imitoCam: the app for photo and wound documentation

imitoCam enables healthcare professionals in hospitals to use the available smartphone technology for a secure photo and wound documentation - photos can be taken using the app on a smartphone or tablet and saved directly into the electronic medical record of the patient.

• The app is fully and seamlessly integrated into the existing organisations IT infrastructure and findings are immediately available in the electronic patient record.
• A wound measurement can directly be done in the app with a precise measurement of the area, length, width and circumference of wounds and specimens.
• Browsing through the timeline of one or more findings of a patient allows for better understanding of the progression.
• The use of cloud-based messaging solutions such as Whatsapp is prevented through an interdisciplinary and convenient team collaboration via chat in the patient context, e.g. for second opinions.
• Clever categorization and a dynamically intelligent organization also deliver added value for research and education.

Project Business Case

Photography has been used in medicine ever since its invention and it is an important part of the documentation of results and research work. Today, however, the pictures are still often taken with compact cameras and organized on file servers in folder structures. That means the photos need to be stored manually and are often not accessible by other teams. The process of taking and storing these pictures is time-consuming. Reusing these valuable artefacts in order to analyze the healing process or to compile pictures for research or training is also very inconvenient and takes a lot of time. Many hospital teams have already started using the available technology. They manage patient images with cloud services and share photos with non-data protection compliant messengers like WhatsApp.

The strong focus on process optimisation in hospitals with the use of the available mobile technologies makes imitoCam the leader in mobile photo-documentation. Faster than any other digital camera technology, without loss in image quality, imitoCam changes the way healthcare professionals integrate and think about clinical photo-documentation: from a time-consuming and hated core it becomes a smart, intuitive and fun daily routine with much-added benefits.

Project Importance

The added values are:

• Time-saving of healthcare professionals: Manual transmissions and assignment of findings are completely omitted.
• Improved quality of documentation: Findings instantly available in the EMR and always saved to the right patient.
• No additional hardware: Cameras and sensors of already available smartphones can be used.
• Seamless integration: The mobile solution is not isolated but integrated into hospital’s existing application architecture.
• Research and education: The dynamic categorization during the recording enables efficient reuse for publications, lectures or education.

Project Impact

Without the app imitoCam, doctors, nurses and other healthcare profesionnals in hospitals and other healthcare organisations would be forced to use digital/compact cameras to document their cases. Because this is very time consuming, digital cameras are not easily available at the patients bedside, they often rely on what is immediatly available, meaning their private smartphones. However, using private smartphones does not respect privacy regulations of patient data. On the one hand, photos are then stored on private cloud services (e.g. Dropbox or iCloud) and often not properly archived into the EMR.