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Will the “Instagram for Clinicians” Be a Game-Changing Educational Resource?

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By Mike Miesen

Working with clinicians to set up forums where care teams would discuss their patients daily, I was privy to the excited eyes and cheshire cat smiles that accompanied the talk of “woah” patients – the medically rare, gross, or otherwise notable cases which made the day a bit more interesting. The patient with Anton-Babinski Syndrome. The child whose amputated hand was proof he shouldn’t have been playing with an axe. The all-too-common gunshot wounds of every type, notable for their stories more than the wounds.

With the release of Figure 1, a photo-sharing app for health care professionals, those conversations can leave the hospital and enter the cloud; physicians can upload a picture to their feed, and it’ll be instantly available to the world. It’s Instagram for health care workers, except instead of filtered “selfies” and pictures of brunch, it has pictures of rare medical conditions and x-rays of things inserted where they shouldn’t be. It’s a new, neat idea that could change the face of medical education or serve as stress-relieving entertainment. Or both.

Dr. Joshua Landy, co-founder at Movable Sciences, said in an email interview that he created Figure 1 to fill a gap he identified in clinician-to-clinician communication. Currently, “many physicians collect images of interesting or representative cases on their smartphones,” and share with colleagues. Sensing an opportunity, and “recognizing the educational benefit of these images,” Landy created an app that would “harness thousands of educational assets being collected by individuals each day.”

The app opened to the public three weeks ago, and has a user base “well into the thousands,” Landy said. Anyone can download it, but only health care professionals can upload images; once vetted, physicians will have a “Verified Physician” badge on their profiles. Users can search for images of specific conditions and have conversations with others through a commenting feature – which Landy said has already been used as a virtual classroom, with “experienced healthcare professionals answering questions for medical students.”

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Instadoc!

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By Rob Lamberts, MD

I grew up in Rochester, NY. Statistically, this means that I probably had a family member who worked at Eastman Kodak, as the company employed over 62,000 people in Rochester at it’s peak. I did, in fact, have two: my father and my brother-in-law. My brother and I both worked there during two fun and profitable summers of our college years in the delightful “roll coating” division. It actually paid quite well, but was miserable work.

Kodak was, at one point, the consummate American success story, dominating its market like few others. In 1976, it had a 90% market share of film, as well as 80% of cameras sold in the US. Kodak Park, the property at the center of manufacturing once employed 29,000 employees, with its own fire company, rail system, water treatment plant, and continuously staffed medical facility.

Fast-forward to 2012, and the picture changes dramatically. In a single year, Kodak declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, received a warning from the New York Stock Exchange that its stock was below $1/share for long enough that it was at risk of being delisted, announced it is no longer making digital cameras so as to focus on its core business: printing, and then a few weeks ago announced it was no longer making inkjet printers. The job force in Rochester alone has gone down by nearly 90%, to an estimated 7200 employees. (All of this info came from Wikipedia, if you wondered).

Adding pain for former Kodak fans was the announcement in April of this year that Facebook was buying the photo sharing company Instagram (which employed 13 people at the time) for an estimated $1 Billion.

So how could a company so dominant be overcome by one with only 13 employees? Didn’t the resources of Kodak give them anything better to sell than this small start-up? And what spelled the doom of a well-proven system of photography that fueled one of the most successful companies of its time? Was it acts of congress? Was it passage of a photography reform bill, or Obamachrome? Was it formation of ACO’s (accountable camera organizations), the use of the photographic centered media home, or the willingness of the government to pay photographers over $40,000 if they prove they use digital cameras in a “meaningful” way?

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Seriously: Is Digital Health The Answer To Tech Bubble Angst?

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By David Shaywitz

As an ever increasing amount of money seems determined to chase an ever greater number of questionable ideas, it’s perhaps not surprising that inquiring minds want to know: (1) Are we really in a tech bubble? (2) If so, when will it pop? (3) What should I do in the meantime?

I’m not sure about Question 1:  I’ve heard some distinguished valley wags insist we’re not in a tech bubble, and that current valuations are justified, but I also know many technology journalists feel certain the end is neigh, and view the bubble as an established fact of life – see here and here.  The surge of newly-minted MBAs streaming to start-ups has been called out as a likely warning sign of the upcoming apocalypse as well.

I have the humility to avoid Question 2: as Gregory Zuckerman reviews in The Greatest Trade Ever, even if you’re convinced you’re in a bubble, and you’re right, the real challenge is figuring out when to get out.  Isaac Newton discovered this the hard way in the South Sea Bubble, leading him to declare, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”

I do have a thought about Question 3, however – what to do: reconsider digital health — serious digital health.

Here’s why: Instagram and similar apps are delightful, but hardly essential; most imitators and start-ups inspired by their success are neither.  It doesn’t strain credulity to imagine investors in these sorts of companies waking up one day and experiencing their own Seinfeld moment, as it occurs to them they’ve created a portfolio built around nothing.

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