PocketHealth makes access to diagnostic images free for patients

After working with hundreds of hospitals across North America to make the diagnostic images and reports of patients downloadable from a secure, private cloud, Toronto- based PocketHealth has been adding features – including translating the reports into patient-friendly language and identifying follow-up recommendations.

For patients, access to their own images and charts is now free through PocketHealth – making it much easier for them to obtain the documents they may need for themselves and for the healthcare providers they visit.

“Earlier this year, we actually made all image access and report access 100 percent free across PocketHealth, across all of North America. And so, now patients can go online, they can log in, they can download all their images with full diagnostic quality, along with their reports, which they can share with their physician and never pay a cent,” said co-founder and CEO Rishi Nayyar, speaking in a Q&A session at the annual MaRS Health Impact conference in Toronto.

The company will be charging for the value-added services, such as turning the medical language into more easily understood English or French and spotting next-steps in the documents – something it’s calling Ask My Doctor.
“Ask My Doctor literally analyzes all of your records and gives you a list of questions that you should be asking your doctor, to give you a really constructive discussion with your physician,” said Nayyar.

“PocketHealth is doing much of this by deploying artificial intelligence in its solution, he said, adding the company will continue to build AI-based tools into the product. “What you can expect over the next couple of quarters with PocketHealth is tons of new, thoughtfully built, thoughtfully integrated AI tools that help you as a patient understand what’s going on.”

Nayyar discussed the rapid growth of PocketHealth, fuelled by the need for patients to share their diagnostic images among different healthcare professionals as they go from one medical centre to another.

Before PocketHealth came on the scene in 2016, images were often burned onto CDs and handed to the patient – usually at a cost, and often requiring the patient to make a long trip to the hospital.

Afterwards, some patients would lose their disks, forcing them to start all over again. In other cases, when patients were being transferred by ambulance to another hospital, crews would be waiting for the CDs to be created. It was an unwieldy process for both patient and provider.

PocketHealth initiated a sea-change across North America by creating a solution that uploaded images to a secure cloud. From there, patients and providers could access them whenever needed.

“We have 1.5 billion images on the platform,” said Nayyar. “It’s the largest patient-controlled image-base in the entire world.”

The solution really took off because of the COVID-19 crisis, he explained. At that time, the public saw how important it was to have their vaccination records available online.

The idea of bringing other records online, such as their imaging records, was then easily understandable. Patients quickly saw how useful it would be.

Importantly, when patients have access to their records, they become advocates for their own health – and in many cases, their outcomes are improved. The also tend to find errors in the records that are sometimes overlooked by health professionals. “When you give patients access to data … they can find mistakes. They can correct them before it’s even a big deal,” said Nayyar.

Nayyar noted that while most hospitals have electronic archiving systems for diagnostic records, until very recently they haven’t been connected. That meant they weren’t able to share the records.

Some provinces, including Ontario, are now creating the ability to share records, but they still don’t help a patient who injured himself in Ontario and moved to British Columbia, for example. It would still be difficult to transfer the records from one place to the other.

But by using PocketHealth, the patient can control the process. He or she can access the records in the PocketHealth cloud, providing them to clinicians of their choice in Canada, the United States or around the world. “We’ve found the true way to build interoperability is through the patient,” said Nayyar.