With a user base of half a million healthcare professionals around the world and more than 1 billion views of its medical cases, mobile healthcare image-sharing platform Figure 1 is starting to tap into its critical mass.
In December, Toronto-based Figure 1 launched Insights, a survey function within the app to take the pulse of its massive user community that now includes half the medical students in North America, according to CMO Dr. Joshua Landy. “We want to give them a platform for the issues they’re talking about,” said Landy, a critical care physician in private practice.
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“We see thousands of responses a day,” Landy reported. There was “curiosity” when the movie “Concussion” came out on Christmas day, he said. Plenty of users also wanted to know about presidential candidate Ben Carson’s medical training.
Mostly, though, the “Instagram for Doctors” — a label Landy actually doesn’t much care for — is looking to help healthcare professionals in their work.
Over one weekend in January, more than 3,100 users weighed in on gun violence. At some hospitals, it changes care, Figure 1 found.
“Nurses are scared to take care of gunshot victims out of fear that the shooter will come to finish the job,” said one nurse.
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“I see patients after surgery to repair damage from [gunshot wounds]. Sometimes patients are in police custody or have police presence waiting to question them. Have to put some under alias, others under watch for gang violence — have had rival gang members on same floor and had to block off sections so the visitors don’t attack each other,” another nurse offered.
This month, Figure 1 queried its community about the Zika virus. A common theme was how hard it is to diagnose a Zika infection, even in countries where it is endemic. “It seems like an arbovirus. The differential diagnostic is dengue and chikungunya. We don’t know how to confirm it with only clinical features, and sometimes serology [a diagnostic test] is missing,” a medical intern from Brazil said.
In the U.S., Europe and even India, there is more fear than doubt, but the general consensus is that now is a good time to prepare and to learn what to say to concerned patients.
In Canada, the National Post newspaper based an in-depth story about whether to classify obesity as an epidemic on Figure 1 Insights, according to Landy. “This is a way to take the pulse of the global healthcare community,” Landy said.
Insights could expand “We’re sort of feeling it out to see if we want to do something larger with it,” Landy said. “With appropriate institutional support, I can see it getting very large.”
