No more waiting around to publish an interesting finding in a medical journal

Dr. Joshua Landy is envisioning a new way for doctors to learn from one another. A Toronto-based intensive care physician by trade, Landy is the co-founder of a « crowdsourced photo sharing app for health care professionals. » Launched just two weeks ago, the iPhone app is already populated with images both clinically significant and arguably beautiful — without even the benefit of a filter.

« There is a culture among physicians of sharing interesting findings, whether they’re classic ones that we learn in medical school but rarely see, or they’re just picture-textbook-perfect versions of things that we see day-to-day, » Landy explained when I asked about the inspiration behind his idea. His vision is to take these things that are already being passed around via email or photo message — and then subsequently lost — and make them available to the wider medical community.

Once uploaded to the app, the images become public content (stringent privacy guidelines ensure that any potential patient identifiers are edited out). Landy envisions a sort of Wikipedia of medical images, « a curated free-access almanac of features of medicine » that anyone can contribute to, edit, or learn from. While the company isn’t disclosing any numbers yet, Landy said usership is already « well into the thousands. »

See on www.theatlantic.com