The “Instagram of Medicine” Lets Doctors Share Medical Photos With Each Other
Step aside, rich kids of Instagram. There’s a new group of people in town sharing images that are equally as unappealing and vomit-inducing. They’re called doctors, and they’ve got themselves a new app dubbed Figure 1.
You can liken it to Instagram, save for the fact it’s strictly used to post medical images. Images posted allow medical professionals to share, shall we say, interesting pictures of cases they’ve run into or want feedback on. These images are shareable with colleagues, or an entire network of doctors.
“I developed Figure 1 because I wanted a safe way to share medical images with the medical community, while protecting patients’ privacy,” says Joshua Landy, the co-founder of Figure 1.
On the topic of privacy, you needn’t worry when your doctor whips out his or her iPhone and starts snapping photos of your medical mysteries. The app automatically blocks out faces, and identifying marks like tattoos can be painted over to further protect one’s privacy. Whether or not your doctor does something else with the photo on their personal mobile phone is a story for another day. Thankfully, a consent form is built in, so chances of your mutated body ending up on another image sharing application is possibly further slimmed down.
Already, hundreds of images have been uploaded by doctors using the app. But it should be noted, anyone can download the application and post their own images, which if Internet history has taught us anything, may not fare well.
Feeling brave? The application is available on the iTunes App Store for free.
(via Figure 1 via National Post)
