Four Operations scheduled for fiscal 2005

UAB joins a long list of prestigious academic medical institutions, including Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School, The Cleveland Clinic, Wake Forest and Vanderbilt universities, and the University of Maryland, in exploring live Web casts. "The UAB Health System saw this as a great opportunity to offer physicians and the public a way to see the new University Hospital state-of-the-art operating suites and the innovative work being done here," Susan Reid, marketing manager in the Department of Marketing Communications, says. Reid manages the UAB Health System Web site.

Extremely positive response

The advantage of this medium is it can be viewed worldwide from any computer with Internet access. National and international viewers can e-mail questions and receive a response from surgeons in minutes. UAB received e-mail questions from as far away as Pakistan and the Philippines internationally and California and Illinois in the U.S. during its first Web cast, a laparoscopically assisted endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography performed by Ronald Clements, MD, and Mel Wilcox, MD, and moderated by Brandon Roy, MD. The live Web cast logged 800 viewers. Archived video received an additional 1,200 viewers the first month and is available for viewing for a year.

The second live Web cast was a laparoscopic right hemicolectomy performed May 19 on a patient with an ascending colon tubulovillous adenoma. The surgeon was Martin Heslin, MD, and moderator was J. Pablo Arnoletti, MD. The third Web cast was an abdominoplasty on a gastric bypass patient; John Anastasatos, MD, performed the surgery on June 20. The year's final Web cast will be a thoracic aortic endograph performed by William Jordan, MD, on August 23.

After Web casts are completed, archives can be accessed via www.health.uab.edu/webcast. Physician viewers can register for CME credit for viewing live or archived versions.