iPad-Based Telemedicine Platform Supports Collaboration

Digital health startup Nephosity Inc. (Venice, CA) has announced that its Jack Imaging telemedicine platform for collaborative multispecialty care now offers new features such as case management, video conferencing, and screen sharing. The platform earlier had received FDA approval as a Class 2 medical device on its native iPad platform.

Jack Imaging's patent pending technology also provides secure messaging, HD ready video conferencing, and cloud-based collaborative medical image viewing, all within the web browser. Nephosity says that using Jack Imaging, "a patient, her primary care provider, and her specialists can securely and effectively collaborate over her medical and imaging records to achieve best possible outcomes."

According to the company, all of Jack Imaging's features are platform independent and available from within the web browser. It employs no plugins or other installed software, thus ensuring that everyone can use the platform anywhere, anytime.

Jack Imaging is Nephosity's second iPad-based product to receive FDA approval. A year ago the company announced the availability of its MobileCT Viewer, a software application for HIPAA compliant viewing and manipulation of CT, MRI, and X-ray images.

All of this brave new mobile world stuff is illustrative of how the very concept of telemedicine has changed as technology has evolved. The first experiments in telemedicine, more than 40 years ago, were little more than a phone and TV hookup with a doctor on one end and a clinic on the other. In those pre-Internet days, this notion of extending care to patients in remote areas was heady, cutting-edge stuff. Remember, brick-sized cell phones were still 20 years in the future.

Nowadays, any number of companies are struggling to gain market share in a field that Patrick Moorhead, writing for Forbes magazine, says "is about to get very, very hot."

Moorhead bases his slam-dunk prediction on the approval on April 28 of new telehealth guidelines by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB). The FSMB, Moorhead says, "for the first time, acknowledged that telemedicine consultations between physician and patient were equivalent to in-person consultations as long as the interaction was done via videoconference."

The FSMB is the organization of individual state medical licensing boards. It creates the policies that unify standards of care nationally. Moorhead continued, "While it has been widely recognized that telemedicine presents the single-biggest change to healthcare delivery, until recently, policy has gotten in the way of progress.... (T)his says video equals in-person....This is huge."

Stephen Levy is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.