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Like “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy”? Then you’ll love this.

High Point Regional Health System plans to let everyone in the operating room about 12:15 today , via social media. The hospital will tweet live during a robotic surgery for prostate cancer that will last about two hours.

“We live in such a live world,” said Kelley O’Brien, interactive media specialist. “It’s not something that’s done that often in our region.”

Twitter, a microblogging service that started in 2006, allows users to send short messages, up to 140 characters. Those messages can be accessed via a Web page or received on a cell phone by an author’s “followers.”

The hospital, which opened its Twitter account less than two months ago, claims 129 followers so far. Not bad for a health institution, O’Brien said.

Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit often gets named as the first hospital to tweet a surgery live early last year. Other hospitals soon followed.

O’Brien will sit in for the High Point surgery and send short updates — called tweets — every five minutes or less, depending on what is happening.

It was “not as scary as it sounds,” to set up tweeting the surgery live, she said. The hardest part was explaining to participants what being live on Twitter meant. The hospital, which already has worked with patient blogs online, had the technology ready to go, O’Brien said.

The surgery will feature a new da Vinci robot, which was bought with part of a $1 million donation. The hospital has performed robotic surgeries before, but this is the first one that will be followed so closely, said hospital spokesman Chad Campbell .

Several local news outlets have been invited to attend.

The attention doesn’t faze patient Philip Vincent too much. He hopes the spotlight will promote both the need for prostate cancer screening and the options available to men who contract the disease.

If following the tweets convinces one man to get tested who turns out to have the disease, “then that’s worth it,” Vincent said.

The hospital likely will tweet more surgeries, O’Brien said. She also hopes to offer live video streams online and possibly limited video streams for family members who are unable to attend a birth, for example.

“Our objective is to start relating to patients in new ways,” O’Brien said.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com