WinguMD offers clinicians what it calls a medical photo chatting app that lets them take photos to document their physical examination and share them with colleagues. But the medical app goes beyond serving as a simple repository of clinical photos. It can also integrate with EHRs, a DICOM PACS system, TigerText, and related services.
However, the main feature of the WinguMD medical app is a body location tagging system called BodyMapSnap. Using the tool, clinicians initially view a schematic of the body divided into several sections, with laterality. Once a photo is taken it can be mapped to a specific part of the anatomy for future reference and then shared with colleagues as encrypted files. If, for example, the user takes a photo of a mole on a patient’s left hand, he or she clicks on the left hand of the schematic to map it to that portion of the anatomy.
The medical app also lets users annotate each photo to give it context, and allows them to do a metadata search, which can search by body part or annotations. WinguMD has also developed a relationship with BOX that enables users to store images in the vendor’s HIPAA compliant cloud.
Of course, WinguMD is not the first medical app to facilitate the sharing of medical images. Figure 1, for instance, which has been described as an exclusive Instagram for physicians, is a free program from Movable Science. It features a database of user-submitted images of medical pathology–a somewhat different focus from WinguMD. It also takes a different approach to HIPAA compliance. Instead of using technological wizardry, it relies on a more old-fashioned approach, namely face-blocking and privacy release forms. The medical app lets clinicians upload, view, comment on, and favorite images straight from the iPhone.
