Industry Trends

“Instagram for Physicians” Launches Upgraded Features

photographing pregnant women with smart phone

photographing pregnant women ith smart phoneThe social media trend seems to be finding its way into every facet of business, in all industries across the globe. An increasing number of smartphone and tablet apps appear daily, aiming to make our lives easier, faster-paced, more manageable, better organized, more informed, and unceasingly connected.

With the advent of electronic medical records, more and more programs and apps make patient information readily available and easily accessible for patients and clinicians alike.

Medical photo-sharing app Figure 1—dubbed the “Instagram for physicians”—recently launched new features and upgrades in response to increased adoption and utilization by clinicians, TechCrunch reports.

Weatherby Healthcare announced Figure 1’s initial launch in a Red Ribbon Blog post last summer. Since that time, the increasingly popular app has become available in 18 languages across six countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand—with plans to rapidly expand into new geographic areas.

Today, Figure 1 boasts 3.5 image views per second and approximately 50 million image views since its launch. The app’s new features help it move into more of a social media platform by allowing increased collaboration between clinicians around the world, as well as the ability to follow medical cases and discuss presentation, diagnoses, and treatment.

To improve the networking component, Figure 1, Inc. now allows users to create more in-depth profiles, including detailed biographies. The company also teamed up with physician networking site Doximity to allow communication between the two programs—much like the way Facebook and Instagram communicate and allow sharing of content.

“We really have two valuable things,” says co-founder Gregory Levey in the TechCrunch article. “We are concentrating on the product and growth, and moving a little bit from educational information to more practical ways we can be used by care groups and other professional organizations.”

Figure 1, Inc.’s privacy policies are strict. In-app tools—like the automatic facial recognition and blocking feature—ensure patient information is removed before posting. All images are then vetted for patient-privacy compliance by a medical officer and a team of moderators before going live in the app. Uploaded images can be locked in “private” mode—making them only visible by the clinician who uploaded them—shared with contacts, or “public” for all Figure 1 users to see. Images may also be selected for “Image of the Week,” or submission to medical journals and other educational sites.

The app is available free of charge on iOS and Android platforms.

About the author

Amy Coelho

Amy Coehlo has more than 10 years of combined experience in the areas of journalistic and technical writing, public relations, brand management, marketing and communications.

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