“I’m a very visual learner. Most doctors are … and we like to talk to each other,” explains third-year medical resident Sheryll Shipes of Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, in Texas.
Last year Shipes began using Figure1, a photo-sharing app through which healthcare professionals can share photographs and information about their patients for both learning and diagnosis purposes. “It’s now my medical guilty pleasure,” she adds.
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“It’s classic medicine, digitized,” says Shipes. Having used Figure-1 religiously over the past year, Shipes readily sings its praises after the app helped her diagnose a patient with an unusual skin disorder causing blisters on certain parts of her body. “I uploaded it to Figure-1 and someone told us exactly what it was,” she says. The condition turned out to be common to Latin America and Asia but rare in the United States. “We would never have known that one.”
Now Landy hopes word will spread even further. “It’s overdue for a tool like this,” he concludes. “I’d like to see it everywhere.”
