 Raises $1.6M to soundly Share clinical images on Smartphones)
WITS(MD) Raises $1.6M to soundly Share clinical images on Smartphones
The smartphone is beginning to play an even bigger position in healthcare. medical doctors are the usage of mobile devices for the whole lot from having access to electronic health information to communicating with patients to taking images of sufferers’ illnesses.
the difficulty with that closing one, says WITS(MD) CEO ok. Thomas Pickard, is that taking clinical images with a smartphone creates two issues: sensitive health knowledge could be uncovered if the cellphone gets lost or stolen, and there’s no reputable documentation of the doctor taking the picture.
Pickard’s firm created instrument, known as ImageMover, to unravel each of those concerns.
WITS(MD)’s cell app, on hand on Apple’s App store or Google Play, encrypts the photo and transmits it to again-finish instrument that transfers the photograph into the sanatorium’s picture archives and the patient’s electronic health report. as soon as successfully transmitted, the app erases the picture from the phone. The device is compliant with patient privateness regulations—no personal health information is ever existing on the phone, so the chances of a privateness breach are virtually zero, WITS(MD) says.
The Middleton, WI-primarily based firm unveiled the product at a healthcare IT trade conference in April.
And this week, it closed on $ 1.6 million in funding, largely from Wisconsin angel buyers, Pickard says. those backers embody Jim Berbee, an entrepreneur, scientific doctor, and university of Wisconsin-Madison clinical assistant professor.
“What we’re really seeking to do right here is resolve the doctor an identical of texting and riding,” Pickard says. “It’s something we know we’re no longer imagined to do; and within the doctor world, it’s rather neatly-known physicians are taking footage of sufferers and sharing them with each other,” he says. “Many scientific institutions find this to be a standard scenario, the place in the pastime of getting the suitable data into the precise palms, physicians will use any means that you can think of.”
Pickard shares an example the place an individual arrives at an emergency room late at night time with an important lower on the forehead. The emergency doctor on duty has to make a decision—should he or she sew up the laceration, or should the medical institution’s go-to plastic health practitioner be referred to as in to treat the wound? The on-call doctor may snap a photograph of the damage on a smartphone and ship it to the ace plastic doctor to ask for an opinion, Pickard says.
however and not using a steady resolution like WITS(MD)’s software, Pickard says, patient information will be compromised, and there’s a lack of accountability if something goes flawed with the therapy. “If the patient is sad with the result, there’s no manner of going back and verifying what took place,” Pickard says.
WITS(MD) used to be based in 2013 by Gary Wendt and Richard Bruce, two medical medical doctors and UW-Madison professors who co-invented the corporate’s patent-pending software. Pickard, who lives in San Francisco, came on board as CEO in April. He up to now used to be website online lead and director of healthcare business advertising for Lexmark Healthcare. Pickard labored with WITS(MD) director of engineering Mark Gehring on the former UltraVisual clinical techniques in the early 2000s.
WITS(MD) will use the seed funds essentially to hire extra employees in Wisconsin, Pickard says, declining to share how large the workforce is now or how a lot it will grow.
the corporate’s first purchaser is UW well being, to be able to begin using WITS(MD)’s instrument in September, first in its dermatology department, Pickard says. the company’s device can also be drawing hobby from surgical departments, he provides.
UW well being will even make ImageMover to be had for sufferers to upload photographs to their online healthcare portal, the place doctors and other care providers may view them. that could doubtlessly shop a health care provider’s office seek advice from, Pickard says.
as well as, the instrument has the ability to transmit video clips, which will be useful for finding out a affected person’s gait or monitoring the progress of a patient with an very important tremor disorder, Pickard says. “It’s so much more straightforward to take a small video clip than it’s to write words that [explain] the severity of the tremor.”
helping to transfer medical images and videos from patients to medical doctors could potentially be an even bigger marketplace for WITS(MD) than enabling secure sharing of such media between physicians, Pickard says. “the entire telehealth market is exploding. this is one piece of a bigger ecosystem. however the comfort to patients is marvelous.”
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