Collaborating all over the world on a single screen.
Posted by Ron Otten on 18/03/2009
IBM is working with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to create a web-based, collaborative environment for medical professionals to interact with each other and review radiology images, ECGs, etc. So what’s new? It is a secure medical multimedia experience running inside a single browser window.
The secure Web site that IBM created allows CT scans, MRIs, EKGs, and other medical data to be posted and analyzed using live videoconferencing and whiteboard capabilities. It requires no special software beyond a Web browser and can thus be accessed from a laptop or mobile device, as well as a desktop computer.
The difficulty is how the application, referred to as Blue Spruce, handles the policy issues surrounding the sharing of regulated health data. Blue Spruce is being built on open Web standards. This next generation browser platform was announced back in November. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer. There’s nothing to download for the doctors.
This is how IBM described how the new online radiology theatre will work:
“A group of doctors can log into a secure Web site at the same time to review and analyze a patient’s recent battery of tests. For instance, a radiologist could use her mouse to circle an area on the CT scan of a lung that needs a closer look. Then using the mouse she could zoom into that scan to enlarge the view for all to see. An expert on lung cancer could use his mouse to show how the spot had changed from the last scan. And then, a pathologist could talk about patient treatments based on spots of that size depending on age and prior health history, paging through clinical data accessible on the site.
The theatre allows all these experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, rather than paging through stacks of papers, calling physicians to discuss scan results and then charting the results. This collaborative consultation brings together the personal data, the experts and the clinical data in one physical, visual theatre.”
