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“We work with patients who carry bags of CDs between doctors,” said Mika Wang, head of business development for medical imaging company Nephosity.
"The issue with medical imaging today is it is a very fragmented, siloed system," Wang said. "When a patient is referred to a specialist, often times their scans are transferred via CD which, according to most statistics, do not load 20 percent of the time due to incompatible software, corrupt readers or simply image viewers not loading properly."
However, pushing medical images to the cloud - the obvious tech solution- is not as easy as it sounds. Entrenched interests, patient privacy law and massive file sizes make the medical imaging industry full of problems - and full of potential for disruption.
DICOM files, the standard format for CT, MRI and X-ray images, can’t be emailed because they’re too large, Wang said. And besides HIPPA, the patient privacy law that governs the handling of medical images, forbids sending patient medical information across unsecured email.
What’s more, some medical imaging facilities sometimes prefer the inefficiencies of the healthcare system because duplicate care is an opportunity to double charge patients. According to Wang, the copay for CDs with CT, MRI or X-Ray images can cost patients as much as $50 a piece and "when CDs don't load and scans are needed, patients may undergo a duplicate scan."
Those costs add up. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2010 Medicare spent around $10 billion for medical images, “an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of those costs are duplicate exams.”
Nephosity hopes to smooth out this fragmented and inefficient system with a HIPPA-compliant, cloud-based imaging sharing system that's friendly for patients and doctors.
"Our goal is to make images available at point of care, and across transitions of care," said Wang. Nephosity wants to create a "collaborative system, connecting physician specialty types, patients, and imaging facilities."
And Wang said they see the biggest problem coming from patients moving between big medical systems. While large hospital systems have become efficient at sharing medical information internally, their incentive to share such information externally is small, so problems sharing outside their walls often go unaddressed. Nephosity wants to fix that problem by "ensuring records are available as the patient transitions between care centers," said Wang.
Nephosity is initially focused on patients who undergo frequent scanning: "Some patients get scanned every four to six months, amounting to an abundance of scans to manage and transport,” said Wang.
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The company’s image sharing technology comes in two forms: an iPad app called Mobile CT Viewer, which is FDA approved for diagnosis, and Jack Imaging, a browser-based tool that isn’t FDA approved for diagnosis, but allows doctors to collaborate around a patient’s images. Both imaging viewing options are HIPPA compliant.
Similar to the collaboration allowed on Google Drive, Nephosity’s Jack Imaging software allows doctors to view images, add their own annotations, make measurements, pin notes and even tag points with verbal dictations which are converted into text. Because CT and X-ray images represent 3-D objects in slices, Nephosity’s software also allows doctors to tag individual image slices for sharing.
Looking to the future, the company wants to expand beyond imaging, so it is building out more collaborative features including document sharing, secure messaging and video conferencing. Wang said, "we realized working on this so long, you really need to identify the incentives that motivate each stakeholder to participate in connected, collaborative care." Additional resources should help with that. Ultimately, "the bigger goal is to empower patients, improve provider workflow, and deliver better care.”
Nephosity has around $500,000 in seed funding and is looking to raise series A soon.
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