Software for Clients: Smartphone

Software for Clients: Smartphone

Fleming Dermatopathology has produced iPhone and Android apps which are distributed as free downloads from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market, respectively. They are packaged with demo data sets so practitioners who are not yet clients of the lab can try them. They are HIPAA-compliant to maintain the privacy of the patient data they manage.

For clients, they offer the following:

• Immediate delivery of new reports as soon as they are signed out by the lab. The smartphone receives a push notification (audible alert) when new reports become available.
• Access to old reports which can be searched by name or by date.
• Submission of an electronic pathology slip which can consist of text, digitized images, digitized audio, or any combination of these. Demographic data and clinical information can be transmitted as text, accompanied by a photograph of the lesion’s clinical appearance taken with the smartphone’s camera, and an audio clip with additional clinical information recorded with the smartphone’s microphone. Alternatively, a complete slip could be constructed without text, by photographing the patient’s face sheet and dictating a few details such as site and clinical impression. A slip could be submitted in this manner in just a few seconds.

Photographs can be annotated on the smartphone, to label the site of a biopsy, for example. All digital media (photos and audio clips) remain available to our clients via our website indefinitely.

To our knowledge, these communication technologies are entirely unique to Fleming Dermatopathology.