iPhone App Serves As Instagram For Doctors
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Healthcare app allows for secure sharing of images to foster education
Being called “healthcare’s Instagram” for its social functions, Figure 1 is the now the industry’s hottest app. “We developed Figure 1 so members of the healthcare community could share images, knowledge, and clinical insight with each other, while safeguarding patient privacy,” said co-founder Joshua Landy, MD, a Toronto-based critical care physician.
According to Fierce Mobile Healthcare, Figure 1 “allows doctors to share interesting photos of medical conditions and in the process is building a valuable crowdsourced image library for healthcare professionals. Users can, for instance, search a library of medical images by anatomy or within specific specialties, including ones such as palliative medicine and psychiatry that don't necessarily lend themselves easily to a visual format.
To address HIPAA concerns, technical co-founder Richard Penner, a software developer, added a face-blocking algorithm. Scope at Stanford explains all identifying information about a patient must be removed or blurred from photos, and content providers sign a quick, HIPAA-compliant consent form for each photo uploaded.
“Growing your skill set as a medical practitioner is directly related to the number of cases you see. Seeing more cases, even in a lightweight format, will hopefully drive medical curiosity and influence learners to study real-life cases. Additionally, having another professional to interact with at the other end of the case provides a vibrant learning experience,” says Landry.
Landry says one unexpected benefit of Figure 1 is a sense of community. “It takes the sometimes lonely practice of medicine and makes it a more communal experience. At any time, I know that I can connect with people in similar circumstances who are focused on solving similar problems in healthcare.”
In the future, the co-founder would like to see the app expand into more categories, such as views from microscopes and lab images. "So much of medicine happens on a smaller scale than we appreciate," he said. "Ultimately, we have a mandate to document the entirety of medicine and its visual representations, so there are likely to be many more categories added."
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