Consider the following scenario: A patient in a small town gets a CT report that shows a suspicious mass in the lung. The local medical community refers that patient to the big-city tertiary cancer center for specialty care. Commonly, the tertiary care center will repeat the imaging (even if it is only a few days old). Reasons for this include that the patient didn’t bring the CD containing the image with them or that the format on the CT is unreadable by the new hospital’s system. This results in a loss of time and a waste of precious healthcare dollars.
Lifeimage, Inc., aims to change that. They bring today’s “cloud computing” to the world of radiology. The concept is that users (doctors or the patients themselves) can upload their imaging to a central server that can be accessed from any web browser. Encryption and security will be central concerns, but this is a nice application of existing technology that is summed up in the company’s assertion that in the current paradigm, someone can easily upload their imaging to Facebook in seconds, but their doctor can’t access it on his hospital’s system.
Link: LifeImage, Inc
(hat tip: Mass Device)
