Children's Medical Center in Dallas will provide live Twitter updates from its operating room Monday, while 3-year-old John Gilbreath receives a kidney transplant from his father.

According to hospital officials this will be the first time any hospital has twittered from a transplant surgery. This is also the first time the 483-bed hospital will use the social networking platform to inform the public about a surgery.

The center has had a Twitter account for some time says Jessica Newell, media relations manager at Children's Medical Center, but only actively started using it last August. Staff members from the public relations departments at UT Southwestern and Children's will be twittering live from both ORs. 

"Currently, nearly 85,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney.  We hope that twittering from this surgery will help raise awareness for organ donation, as well as living organ donation," says Newell.

Juan Arenas, MD, a transplant surgeon at UT Southwestern, part of The University of Texas System, will perform the nephrectomy on Chris Gilbreath, a firefighter from Bonham, Texas. Gilbreath's son's surgery will be performed by Dev Desai, MD, a UT Southwestern pediatric transplant surgeon at Children's Medical Center.

Children's has become an active participant in other social media platforms, with a YouTube channel, a Facebook page and a blog, which it just launched in April.

We'll continue to follow this story and will provide re-tweets of the surgery at www.twitter.com/HealthITNews.

Photos courtesy of Louis Curtis, Jr.