Social media is spreading to the operating room.

As you can see from this picture, surgeons at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital are using Twitter, via TweetDeck in this case, before, during, and after a procedure to broadcast their findings to other doctors in real-time. Here’s an example of such a Twitter feed.

It’s an efficient, and effective, way to transmit medical findings instantly, and to a wide audience.

The phenomenon is a natural extension of blogging, and soon, I suspect, we’ll find more medical findings being first reported on other social media platforms like Facebook.

Of course, doctors that do so will be carefully scrutinized to ensure that they do not violate patient privacy, similar to physicians who blog, and patients should be informed that their procedure is being “broadcast” over the Internet.