Sicko and Michael Moore tells a real story!

There were many reviews and critiques about Michael Moore's Sicko. I have not seen it but I will be soon. But I have read enough.
Insurance companies are making money on people's sickness. Out of 300 million people in USA, if they made $1000 out of 216 million! Then you can be sure they will do anything keep this free money flowing.
This is a story that came out of Sicko!
"Others tell more heartwrenching stories of loved ones lost because their health insurance would not approve their surgery or chemotherapy. Some whistleblowers support these allegations.

One of them is Dr. Linda Peeno, former medical reviewer at Humana. “In the spring of 1987 as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would have saved his life and thus caused his death,” testifies Peeno. “In fact what I did was saved the company half a million dollars. For this.""

Go get sick at Sicko! or learn more!!

Tags: sicko, michael moore

DICOM, PACS and Open Source

Open source tools have helped promote DICOM standards from early on in relation to PACS use. The tools – which can be used as fully implemented production software – can also be useful for teaching as well as ways to measure performance, said Ron Sweeney, engineer 3, Spectrum Health, Technology and Information Solutions of Grand Rapids, Mich., at the Open Source PACS Tools session at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (formerly SCAR) meeting in Austin, Texas.

Of course, open source is a big deal these days. It’s a major buzz word in the tech world, and even PRI (Public Radio International) has taken the name for one of its programs. Many open source tools are in existence, but as of yet many of them are not being used in medical settings because they have not been documented for use in “PACS trenches,” said Sweeney.

Read the rest at HealthImaging

Tags: DICOM, Open Source, PACS

Medicinal Digital Photography!

I found this article about Digital Photography at iPath site. I think it is a very interesting article and I decided to publish a little of it to wet your appetite before forwarding to the actual article with much more information.
David Riba Torrecillas^*, Jorge Soler-González and Antonio Rodríguez-Rosich

*ABS Tremp, Institut Catalá de la Salut; ABS Rambla Ferran, Institut Catalá de la Salut; Medicine Faculty, Universitat de Lleida (UdL), Institut Catalá de la Salut, Lleida, Spain

Over the past decade, digital imaging technology has become widespread: most cameras now sold in North America and Europe are digital rather than film based. Digital photography has become an easy, inexpensive and rapid way to capture clinical images.¹ Medical fields such as dermatology, radiology and ophthalmology² have been using digital imaging for some time, but family doctors are also well positioned to take advantage of these evolving imaging trends.³ Digital photography can help physicians provide better medical care by adding accurate, easy-to-capture clinical images directly to electronic records (replacing inaccurate or inadequate clinical descriptors or stylized pen and ink sketches in our notes). The growth and evolution of lesions and wounds can also be monitored. In addition, this format allows images to be shared through telemedicine services⁴ or for images to be sent (through intranet or the internet) quickly and efficiently from one health care level to another for consultations with colleagues or for teaching⁵ and research.

We aim to briefly summarize the approaches that we have found useful for introducing digital photography into the family physician's practice.
Now the link to the real thing

Tags: Medicine, digital imaging, medical imaging

Internet Pathalogy Suite, iPath

iPath is an open source software project with the aim of developing a multi-purpose communication platform for tele medicine, distance learning and medical knowledge management. If you are interested in using this software for your own purpose, please visit sourceforge site.

iPath started from a research project at the Department of Pathology of the University Hospital Basel. In the beginning, the aim was to create a framework for remote frozen section. The first experiments date back to 1992 when a test installation using ISDN was set up with the regional hopital in Samedan.

There is also a test server installed that you can use to verify the operation of the server and the application. But you will have to register here before you could access the server. The list server has both open and closed groups and could be viewed here.

http://www.txoutcome.org/

Tags: iPath, tele-medicene