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It’s always interesting to see examples of how mainstream tech companies move into health care. Symantec is following the path of taking its capabilities for storage management and cloud-based hosting and tweaking them so that they’re selling a storage system for images. Given that this means hospitals and image centers don’t have to buy and manage in house storage, that’s pretty attractive. But the interesting thing they’ve done is to create an easy way that any physician can share images with any other—either uploading images themselves to Symantec’s cloud storage or having them come from PACS systems or direct from imaging machines. And (assuming it takes off) that in turn will create viral pressure on image producers (like hospitals and imaging centers) to get them into the system and therefore buy more storage. Clever, huh.
I talked with Lori Wright, VP of SymantecHealth about this new image sharing service and she gave me a quick demo—all well captured on the trusty Flip cam. You’ll see why this is intriguing for doctors and, perhaps in the future, patients. (I can certainly imagine OBGYNs sharing ultrasounds with patients one day soon)
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I couldn’t agree with Matthew more about the opportunity for OBGYNs to share images with patients. Think of all the parents-to-be who share images of their offspring during gestation. SymantecHealth would well serve this community as well as their brand and the brand of their clients (hospitals and imaging centers), by developing a web based and mobile social network for patients around sharing images. Imagine mommy bloggers recommending OBGYNs based on such patient-centered services. Say goodbye to carrying around that 20 week ultrasound scan in your wallet!
The ease of sharing these images in this manner will certainly facilitate distance consults including those with foreign trained radiologists. This will hurt radiologists in first world countries, but has significant potential to help facilitate and speed delivery of medicine in less urban settings where doctors may not have a ready peer with whom to discuss.
I thought it was amazing how much of a social networking flavor it had. Wonder if it will help with adaptation.
The most interesting aspect of this will be the ability of radiologists anywhere in the world to access images and provide interpetation (ie Night Hawks). This could radically reduce costs -and the income of radiologists in the U.S. Could be a real game changer in Radiology –