A family-medicine doctor recent saw a 13-year-old with a weird, unidentifiable rash. It wasn't itchy or painful, and the teenage boy hadn't traveled anywhere recently. So the the doctor did what any modern physician would do: he took a photo and uploaded it to an Instagram-style app called Figure 1.
Figure 1 is the brainchild of Josh Landy, an internist from Toronto. He did his residency at Stanford and saw constant, off-the-cuff consults happening in hospital hallways, where doctors would try and talk through the details of a case that was surprising or new to them.
"It can be 4 a.m. when you're working, and you're going to see something that can astonish you," Landy said. "It might be the most classic textbook example of something you don't know about, and it happens when there are not a lot of other people around. So the idea was there has to be a better way to communicate."
Landy started doing research on his fellow residents and found that 13 percent were already using their smart phones to share images with one another via email or text message. What if there was a wider network to share those images and get more input from not just one hospital's residents, but the wider medical community?
Originally published in Vox
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