When Eleanor Day, age 79, heard her first sounds, more than 1,700 people around the world were watching on the Internet.
The world was logged in to the Swedish Neuroscience Institute and the live surgical placement of of a Cochlear Implant — often referred to as “bionic ears.” A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing.
The surgery that installed the implant was the culmination of of a bold online video series and educational campaign created by Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center that ran from September to mid-October of 2012. The outreach campaign informed prospective patients about the Center for Hearing and Skull Base Surgery at the Swedish Neuroscience Institute. The public learned what a cochlear implant is and how surgeons prepare for and carry out the procedure.
Since the audience for this particular procedure was hearing impaired, the videos were transcribed and closed-captioned using Twitter and Instagram. The educational program culminated in the dramatic live surgery itself
“We’ve done live streamed surgeries, procedures, and discussions before, where we’ve done a combination of a live streamed surgery, and then a Q&A with a doctor live,” said Dana Lewis, the hospital’s digital media and e-health strategist. “Because of the nature of hearing loss and the difficulty of trying to figure out a way to transcribe it live, we thought perhaps instead of just the raw footage that we could instead use picture and text to narrate. So we decided to use Instagram as a unique way to capture the pictures and Twitter, because we have a very broad audience, and it’s easy for people to find information.
One key to the success of the series was that during its planning, the team reached out to hearing loss organizations, both to get information and to help spread news of the series.
“We partnered with a lot of advocacy groups, like the Hearing Loss Association of Washington, because we really wanted to learn, as healthcare providers, how can we continue to improve the resources we have for a number of audiences, whether it’s different languages, or folks who aren’t able to hear, and make sure we provide world class service,” Lewis says. “We really partnered with them to figure out…what’s the best way to [close] caption the videos, to make this information and these other resources that we already had available to this audience.”
A Pioneering Role
The cochlear implant series wasn’t the Swedish Medical Center’s first time putting surgical procedures online. It has live streamed procedures and even discussions before. It has live streamed a surgery and then offered an online Q&A with the doctor once it was through.
As reported by StreamingMedia.com, the center’s first online video experiment was live streaming a patient’s experience with the sleep clinic, back in July 2010. It streamed a knee surgery live in March 2011 and in December 2011 streamed prerecorded footage of a deep brain stimulation procedure. In March 2012, the center live streamed a video on colon cancer awareness that included streaming footage from a colonoscopy.
The center has also taken its cameras outside of the hospital. In September 2010, a team from its organ transplant program climbed Mount Rainier to raise awareness about the importance of organ donation, something that they’ve repeated yearly. The center made sure the team had special equipment with them. [24×7]
