There’s an app for that

A photo-sharing service for healthcare professionals will be rolled out across Western Europe by the end of the year, BBC News reported this week. The service, called Figure 1, enables physicians to share pictures of their patients with each other and with medical students. Each photo is reviewed by moderators before it is added to the database, and physicians must provide identifying credentials and are advised to notify their employees and patients to find out about consent policies before using the service. Anybody can download the Figure 1 app for free, but only verified healthcare professionals can upload photos or comment on them.

The app is already available in North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, and more than 150,000 physicians have uploaded case photos with the patient’s identity obscured, according to BBC News. Although patients’ faces are automatically obscured by the app, users must manually block identifying marks like tattoos.

Source: BBC News