Following the news feed in pictures of his doctor colleague should soon be possible. By the end of the year, an application of photo sharing on instagram model should see the light of day in Europe. The goal: to allow doctors to consult and share photos of their patients with their colleagues and medical students.
Dr. Josh Landy, physician and co-founder of this app called Figure 1, is in charge of allaying the concerns raised by some skeptics about the respect for anonymity and medical secrecy. Confidentiality rules are respected. The faces of the patients that appear on the photos posted are automatically masked by a black mask. In addition, each image first goes through a moderation filter before being published on the app. “We do not have any medical data. The best way to respect medical secrecy is indeed not to obtain any. We are not an organization that delivers care”, insists Dr. Josh Landy, interviewed by the BBC.
On the other hand, it is the users, in this case the healthcare professionals, who must manually blur characteristic marks such as tattoos which could make it possible to identify patients.
A “transparent vision” of the medical community
Exit the shocking images. Ditto for the photos of too rare diseases which could make it possible to lift the anonymity of the patient. “Everything is done for educational purposes. That is, a lot of the images are in color and match what doctors encounter in their practice every day. It’s a transparent view of a world that the general public rarely gets to see,” says Dr. Landy.
If Figure 1 is available for free on smartphone (for the moment only in North America, Ireland and the United Kingdom), only doctors are authorized to download the photos and comment on them.
Figure 1 is already a great success with doctors. A report carried out last August revealed that more than 125,000 practitioners communicate and share medical images via this app. Over a million images are viewed on Figure 1 every day.
Is an Instagram for doctors a good idea? Have your say on the forum !