Health IT, Startups

ImageMoverMD raises $1.1M to streamline task of adding photos, video securely to EHR

Health X Ventures, a new investor, led the funding round for Madison, Wisconsin-based ImageMoverMD joining several other backers.

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A digital health startup to make the task of uploading medical images taken with a smartphone and other portable devices to an electronic health record easier and more secure has raised more than $1.1 million in the second fundraise for the Madison, Wisconsin-based business ImageMoverMD .

Founded by radiologists Richard Bruce and Gary Wendt, the company’s initial focus was to balance the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend with the practical concerns of security that accompanies it, while also trying to avoid overcomplicating the process.

Health X Ventures, a new investor, led the funding round, which included several backers, Bruce said in a phone interview. The new capital will be used for sales and marketing and product development. ImageMoverMD has a total of 30 investors and has raised $2.7 million to date.

Although the BYOD trend has been growing for quite some time, it has left hospitals vulnerable to heavy fines when those devices go missing with unencrypted patient information on them.

Bruce observed that it is common practice for physicians to use smartphones to send and receive images of patients for quick consults. Bruce used the example of an emergency physician treating a patient with a facial laceration. The current practice is frequently to send that image to a surgeon to see whether plastic surgery is required. The problem is that physician’s phone can be easily filled with unsecured patient information which can take time to delete and poses a security risk. Add to that the fact that physicians are using these images to make medical decisions and these images are frequently not stored as part of the patient’s record.

Bruce described how its flagship tool for mobile devices works. Users have a patients medical record open and click on patient photo option which triggers a QR code which links the photo with the patient’s medical record. Users open ImageMoverMD’s app and the image is transferred to the patient record through an encrypted connection and becomes part of the hospital’s picture archiving system. When that process is complete the image is no longer on the user’s phone or device.

“A big part of what we do is to not replace existing functionality but to augment it,” Bruce said.

The product became available in 2015. UW is a customer but many other institutions are doing pilots, Bruce said. Although it particularly lends itself to areas such as dermatology and pediatrics, other applications include wound management, burn units, and trauma centers. Bruce said some institutions have developed uses the are piloting that the cofounders never considered, including orthopedics to document with videos the progress a patient is making (or isn’t making) in their recovery. On the flip side for neurodegenerative diseases, physicians can use its app to record video documenting the changes in gait to monitor progression of Parkinson’s disease, which can be added to a patient’s medical record.

We built our platform to be able to provide the back end for a whole variety of specific applications,” Bruce said. “We have a number of things on our roadmap that utilize the same technology.”

One example he offered was making it easier for a first responder in the field to send medical images to the emergency department before they arrive.

“Ours is very much a platform and we want to be able to provide something that we and our customers can customize.”

Bruce added that given how much hospitals have invested in electronic medical records, the company wants to help them expand the potential of these systems, particularly for automating medical imaging tasks.

In Madison, the largest electronic health record vendor in the country, Epic Systems, looms large in the community. Bruce acknowledged that although the company developed its product to be EHR agnostic, it was critical that its product worked seamlessly with Epic.

In addition to hospitals, the company has reseller agreements with IBM. The company also white labels its products for other resellers.

“IBM is one of the market leaders for imaging archives,” Bruce said. “Our mobile solution product complements their portfolio because it leverages the power of their imaging archive.”

 

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