MORE Health, a health IT startup that developed a collaborative bilingual platform to support second opinion consults for physicians and their patients is expanding into medical imaging with a clinical decision support tool for oncologists. It is part of the company’s long-term goal to support a “virtual hospital.”
This Fall, the company is planning to apply for 510(k) clearance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cloud-based diagnostic imaging tool to make it easier for physicians to do radiation therapy planning for their patients. In a phone interview, Dale Seavey, vice president of engineering, said the service would be compatible with any system that supports the DICOM medical imaging standard or Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. He referred to it as DICOM RT in the cloud.
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Here’s how it works. MORE Health’s healthcare partner uploads the radiation therapy plan, which includes diagnostic images of the cancer patient, onto MORE Health’s platform. A medical physicist on MORE Health’s team would access that plan, including images, and work jointly with the attending physician on an optimal treatment plan, according to company spokesman Johnny Wong. Together, they would make a determination on whether the images indicate that radiation therapy is being rendered in the correct direction and at the optimal dosage.
The idea is that the company’s approach would save the time it takes to send CDs of scans by mail. Seavey added that because the images are transmitted within MORE Health’s own platform, it’s a more seamless process than downloading images from something like DropBox.
Although Seavey and Wong noted that DICOM RT isn’t new, they believe that using it in a collaborative approach to healthcare is innovative. Another benefit of adding the DICOM RT function is that it could reduce the need for patients to travel.
“The direction we have been moving in has been for more of a collaboration platform for physicians and this was a logical offshoot of that,” Seavey added.
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Seavey said the company decided to add clinical decision support for images to its platform based on feedback it had received from partners on how to better support diagnostics and patient care.
Physicians from at least 12 health systems and hospitals use MORE Health’s platform, including places such as Stanford Health Care, University of California San Francisco Medical Center and Cleveland Clinic, according to the company’s website.
“It was something they brought up so we went ahead and developed it as part of an overall platform,” Seavey said.
Currently, Foster City, California-based MORE Health’s second opinion platform is available in English and Mandarin but Wong said it plans to add Spanish and Cantonese later this year.
Image: Bigstock Photo
