This surgery was filmed last month for OR-Live.com, a Web site that was launched six years ago as a way for doctors to bone up on new techniques by logging on to watch their peers perform surgeries. But recently the site’s been attracting a completely different audience: patients who are curious about new procedures. The Webcasts, which are aired live and later archived, combine the entertainment of TV (it’s a cross between a doctor drama and a reality show) with the usefulness of the Web. And they’re pulling in decent ratings. In the last year, Webcast viewership has more than doubled from 62,000 to 131,000 per week–and consumers make up 60 percent of the audience. “I wanted to know what the doctors weren’t telling me,” says Chuck Elemendorf, who watched a surgery to treat a Chiari malformation, a brain anomaly his 9-year-old son has been diagnosed with.

Of course, even live Webcasts don’t always tell the whole story. Both surgeons and patients are chosen to showcase optimal results–and they’re sponsored by medical-device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Founder Ross Joel compares the site’s funding to how PBS is produced (companies who give grants get cited on air as “sponsors”). Still, it can be off-putting to learn that a spinal surgery was brought to you by “AxiaLIF, the least invasive solution for lumbar fusion.”

Hospitals see the site as a good way to attract new patients–they can showcase star surgeons and introduce new procedures. “The response has been phenomenal,” says Laurence Epstein, a cardiac surgeon who performed a catheter ablation procedure for OR-Live last year. “I’ve had a number of patients come to me and when I start describing the surgery, they tell me, ‘Oh, that’s why we’re here. We saw your Webcast’.” OR-Live has scheduled 150 surgeries this year–some from Belgium and Germany–and will film more than 200 in 2007. Epstein, whose hospital is in talks with film crews to do similar projects on their own, says he believes Webcasts of surgeries will become a common procedure for hospitals in the future. Stay tuned.