April 30, 2012

CLOUD COMPUTING TO IMPROVE PATIENT CARE



Image Share Project Gives Patients and Physicians Anytime, Anywhere Access to Medical Images

(April 30, 2012)  Patients can successfully pull their medical images from the “cloud” making it faster for them to distribute them to their physicians regardless of where those physicians might be, according to a preliminary report of an image share project that involves five different academic institutions.

The image share project includes the University of California, San Francisco, University of Chicago, Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, NY.

“The patient can arrange with their radiologists’ office to have their images and the radiology reports exported into an Internet-based personal health record (PHR),” said David Mendelson, MD, principal investigator of the image share project. Once the information is in the personal health record, the patient has full control over distribution of the images and reports. Images can be viewed immediately online by signing into one’s PHR. In addition, e-mail links can be sent to physicians allowing them to view and download the images and reports as needed, said Dr. Mendelson.