Cloud computing and models using software as a service are increasingly being used on a "per use" or "per case" basis as similar stories related to cloud computing on this blog have appeared. 

It is getting increasingly harder to talk about software with folks without being asked "Is there an app for that?"  The reasons for this are many - lower cost, ease of use, minimal development needed and ready "out of the box" as well as potentially increased portability on small screen mobile devices, tablets and pads.

Now comes word from Visiopharm their entrance into this space with some patent pending technology to facilitate image analysis with free trial, low cost and lowered upfront costs to implement software locally and maintain.

For the clinical market, "per-click" models have been attempted on the hardware side in the past.  These models may create a

disincentive to use versus a larger initial investment as folks get charged per case, per slide or per view.  For software such as image analysis, however, this model makes a lot of sense.  Use what you need when you need it that is proven and reliable from a library of tried and true algorithms.  

If you need to customize, you can create on demand with lower cost, risk and demonstration of performance as you need it.

Dr. Grunkin's quote below pretty much sums this up by lowering many barriers to entry.

For more information on this new offering leverage hosted computing and per analysis offering, check out Visiopharm's webinar mentioned at the end of the below press release and their booth at the upcoming USCAP meeting.

APPsolute Digital Pathology offers a novel approach to Quantitative Digital Pathology. Powered by CloudAnalysis and the APPCenter; currently featuring over 25 ready-to-use Analysis Protocol Packages (APPs).

APPsolute Digital Pathology is a novel approach to Quantitative Digital Pathology (QDP); costs are reduced, the learning curve is minimized, and the common risks of adoption are eliminated. The Visiopharm APPCenter provides access to a library of solutions that are ready-to-run and can be used with minimum training. Analysis Protocol Packages (APPs) can be tested free of charge before investing, productivity is achieved immediately, the upfront costs are low, and solutions can be scaled to fit customer needs.

A Pay-As-You-Go Solution: Low upfront costs

CloudAnalysis and APPs provide a low cost, easy to budget solution for customers who need access to sophisticated image analysis capabilities for a specific amount of time. Whether it is a week, a month, or longer you only pay for analysis when you need it.

Michael Grunkin, PhD, President of Visiopharm, stated "Currently, the cost structure of commercially available deployed Quantitative Digital Pathology solutions prevents the majority of researchers from benefitting from this increasingly important technology. This has to change. With our CloudAnalysis the upfront investment can be reduced to a fraction of any existing deployed solution. With CloudAnalysis there is always access to the most recent software version, studies can be run from anywhere, and technical deployment issues are eliminated."

The patent pending APPCenter provides customers with easy access to an extensive library of ready-to-run APPs. Each APP includes detailed descriptions, references to scientific literature, illustrated examples, webinars, and more. There is no need to become an expert in image analysis; APPs are created and validated in collaboration between experts in the field and Visiopharm’s application scientists and programmers.

Customers try an APP free of charge, before investing, to make sure that 1) the APP is working according to specifications, 2) the APP provides useful results, and 3) the APP can be understood and operated.

APPs are purchased for a low fixed cost, are yours to keep, and will work with both Visiopharm’s DeployedAnalysis and CloudAnalysis solutions. Custom APPs can be developed upon request, at a fixed known cost, and are also risk free with a complimentary trial.

"In a research project involving 300 patients, we worked with Visiopharm’s Image Analysis APPs developed for five different biomarkers. We could work seamlessly on the cloud, we were productive within an hour or two of training, and were able to complete and review the analysis of 5 x 300 tissue specimens in less than a week. The results we achieved were at least as good as manual scoring, and in several cases significantly better. The speed, convenience, and cost structure offered by CloudAnalysis and Image APPs makes Quantitative Digital Pathology an efficient, affordable, and attractive research tool", says Dr. Lars D. Andersen, Associate Professor, Group Leader, Center for Molecular Clinical Cancer Research, Department of Molecular Medicine (MOMA).

Built on leading technology

CloudAnalysis provides instant access from work, home, or from anywhere to the complete suite of Visiopharm software solutions; including advanced image analysis and stereology. Simply log in to your secure account and start to analyze your slides locally or in the cloud.

CloudAnalysis is built upon proven Whole Slide image analysis technology. Johan Doré, CTO at Visiopharm says, "Our solutions have been stress-tested over the last 10 years in the most demanding environments when it comes to capabilities, automation, and throughput. The feedback we consistently get from the world’s most experienced and sophisticated Digital Pathology users is, that we provide solutions with a lower learning curve, lower cost of ownership, by far the lowest computational costs, while providing high quality results."

Visit Visiopharm’s new website at http://www.visiopharm.com to learn more about APPsolute Digital Pathology and [register] for an introductory webinar on March 14, 2012 at 11 AM EST titled “Squaring the Circle of Quantitative Digital Pathology: instant implementation, while increasing productivity and achieving a return on investment."  In this webinar Visiopharm will demonstrate this new generation of software for Quantitative Digital Pathology with a flexible, affordable method of delivery in the Cloud.

About Visiopharm

Over the past 10 years, Visiopharm image analysis and stereology software has become the preferred Quantitative Digital Pathology solution for leading biopharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, and academic researchers all over the world. Visiopharm has more than 300 deployed systems worldwide and a large network of distribution and support partners, and is featured in over 400 scientific publications.

Source: Visiopharm

American Pathology Foundation's 

2012 Spring Conference   

"Charting a New Course for Pathology; 

Navigation and Leadership In Turbulent Times" 

In light of recent regulatory changes - YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS -these valuable sessions that will help you protect your practice, improve your bottom line and prepare for the future.

2012 Spring Conference Speakers & Topics Include:

For online conference registration visit: http://www.apfconnect.org

You may also register over the phone by calling the 

APF National Office toll-free at: 877-993-9935, ext. 202  

            Contact hotel reservations toll-free at:  1-800-266-9432

Corista to provide platform for Massachusetts General Hospital's Pathology Network

The Massachusetts General Hospital Pathology Service has chosen Corista's Digital Image Management Platform (DP3) to support its goal of providing clinical review of pathology cases with a digital platform. This new capability will allow MGH clinical experts to extend their reach to remote patients and their physicians for second opinions in real time.

"Recent technological advances have enabled immediate and widespread access to highly specific pathology expertise, speeding up both diagnosis and the start of treatment," said David Wilbur, MD, Director , Clinical Imaging -Pathology Services at MGH and Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. "The key is having an image-centric platform that provides access together with the tools needed to respond and interact with multiple systems in the community."

Corista’s CEO, Elizabth Wingard said , "We’re pleased to be working with MGH and Partners Healthcare to extend the reach of the hospital’s expertise in pathology to physicians and patients in communities near and far. The Corista platform provides an intuitive case management dashboard that manages workflow and patient cases with digital images, and which can be integrated with existing hospital information systems," Wingard said. "In accessing specialists online and getting an immediate response, remote patients and hospitals can improve patient care with expertise that would have been delayed by days using couriers and FedEx. Eliminating the delay improves the patient’s care by enabling providers to initiate the appropriate treatment plan immediately."

Corista provides Pathologists with a single point of access to read and manipulate patient images with an extensive toolset for analysis, collaboration, diagnosis and report generation. With Corista's platform, MGH will be able to improve the process and quality of pathology medicine while extending real time clinical support for remote patients. 

About Corista

Since 2005, Corista has been developing its image-based processing software and proprietary browser-based software platform.  The patent-pending platform, DP3, provides a comprehensive solution for pathology practices that includes: a universal viewer that reads images from any whole slide imaging platform; secure local and remote image viewing and navigation, image management, on-demand colleague consultation, annotation, measurement  diagnoses; notifications to physicians of new cases or consults to be reviewed, and a centralized Physician Dashboard integrating in-house and remote patient cases into a single view for physicians. DP3 can integrate with existing hospital information systems, is hardware agnostic and supports a complete range of physician devices including high resolution monitors, tablets and touchscreens. 

Full size image

Source: Corista

Exciting news from Aurora Interactive mentioning inclusion of a DICOMizer within their functionality adding another needed piece to integration of pathology images into the PACS and electronic health record (EHR).

Aurora Interactive is including this new functionality in its mScope suite of products to allow a better integration of digital pathology images with radiology images and to simplify the inclusion of digital pathology images in the electronic health record (EHR)

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA- FEBRUARY 22, 2012 – Aurora Interactive announced today that it has added a DICOMizer to its mScope digital pathology product.  This tool will make the inclusion of report images in the hospital PACS possible which will allow the inclusion of these images in the electronic health record (EHR) where the PACS and the EHR are integrated.

“Aurora continues to reinforce its commitment to universality, interoperability, our client’s strategic flexibility and service. We believe in supporting our client’s in their efforts to deliver pathology diagnosis information to all diagnostic stakeholders through whatever means they choose.” stated Pierre Le Fèvre, President and Chief Executive Officer, Aurora Interactive.

About Aurora Interactive Ltd.

Aurora Interactive has developed the leading web based software platform (mScope) for simplification, productivity and ease of communications.  mScope’s Universal Web Viewer has collaborative tools to view medical slides and images anytime, anywhere, regardless of file format.  The software has four applications to aid digital pathology web based communications needs: mScope Education, mScope Clinical, mScope Research and mScope Universal Viewer. Aurora’s mission is to improve patient outcomes and help members of the medical community achieve their full potential by eliminating the learning, diagnostic and collaborative restrictions imposed by time and space. http://www.aurorainteractive.com  

Perhaps in the end this "strategic alliance" aka acquisition of AMA's physician portal by AT&T could be a good thing but commercial ventures by the AMA in the past of this sort have not ended well.  Not sure this impacts pathology to a great degree, perhaps laboratory medicine in the general sense but AMA, in my opinion has not done terribly much on behalf of pathologists or the greater public health and why a majority of physicians are not members of the AMA. Time will tell if this "alliance" between two widely recognized brands will benefit patients and providers and offer a more robust and flexible health information exchange platform.  Meaningful use incentives while important for primary care providers, again, do not impact pathology or laboratories, both in terms of incentives or penalties.  This thanks to recent efforts by CAP to amend meaningful use penalties. This of course would not have come about if the original legislation excluded laboratories and pathologists from the reporting requirements recognizing that while we manage a huge amount of data often times the outcome assessment cannot be complete without missing corresponding clinical information collected by the clinical provider at the point of service of clinical services.  In any event, pathologists are now neither eligible for incentives and won't be penalized for not being able to do it.  Meanwhile, physician organizations can focus on working with communication companies to faciliate transfer of lab order and results so non-laboratory providers can be compensated for "meaningful use".

How about some "incentives" for reporting accurate timely data that is used to meet meaningful use?

AMA Press Release:

Strategic Alliance Helps Thousands of Physicians Modernize Practices

Chicago and Dallas – In a union of two iconic American brands, the American Medical Association (AMA) and AT&T* have formed a strategic alliance that will enable hundreds of thousands of physicians, physician organizations and medical societies nationwide to connect and collaborate with hospitals, payers and patients to help enhance patient care and reduce costs.

The organizations will integrate AMA's AMAGINE™ physician community portal for physicians with AT&T Healthcare Community Online, creating an advanced collaborative care and Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE) platform. By combining the platforms, both powered by Covisint, physicians will have more tools at their fingertips to modernize the management of their practices. 

AMA and AT&T will advance the adoption of health information technology (health IT) across the healthcare ecosystem by enabling customers that use the platforms – physicians, hospitals, payers and patients – to access health IT applications and exchange highly-secure clinical and administrative data. The alliance will create one seamless solution that will enable highly-secure, virtually anywhere, anytime access to advanced applications, aggregated clinical information and data analytics that enable the coordination and management of patient care and population health. 

The relationship will expand the functions and capabilities of the AMAGINE physician community portal that was created to help physicians easily integrate health IT into the management of their practices through a single source with affordable choices. AT&T Healthcare Community Online provides the foundation for a fully clinically integrated system across the entire care team and helps improve collaboration, reduce paperwork and potential errors, and ultimately improve the quality of patient care.

 

Together, the combined platform will:

• Increase caregiver collaboration by connecting AMAGINE customers with AT&T Healthcare Community Online customers
• Provide access to AT&T's patient care and clinical integration solutions that help bring evidence-based information to the point of care
• Enable access to important applications such as clinical decision support, e-prescribing, care management and electronic medical records
• Improve workflow efficiency and streamline processes associated with physician orders and referrals, lab orders and results, medications and discharge planning
• Help physicians to take further advantage of "meaningful use” incentives

"This alliance with AT&T makes the combined product offering that much stronger and more beneficial to physicians,” said Robert Musacchio, Senior Vice President of Business Operations for the American Medical Association. "With the AMA's extensive knowledge of physician and patient needs, and AT&T's proven track record delivering technology solutions to clients, we expect that physicians and their patients will be able to enjoy the benefits of advanced health IT sooner and with more dramatic results.” 

AT&T will own and operate the combined platform as AT&T Healthcare Community Online and lead efforts to evolve technology solutions and bridge clinical and information needs across patients, physicians, hospitals and ancillary organizations. AMA will remain actively engaged and will collaborate with AT&T on business strategies to expand availability and accessibility of health IT for physicians and practices.

"If caregivers across the country aren't connected, they can't collaborate effectively as a team. By joining forces with the nation's largest physician organization, we're providing a seamless solution to meet the "last mile' of connectivity across the entire healthcare ecosystem,” said Randall Porter, Assistant Vice President, AT&T ForHealth, AT&T Business Solutions.

Both organizations will be discussing the alliance at booth #3829 at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas from Feb. 20 - Feb. 24, 2012.

###

For more information contact:

Robert J. Mills
American Medical Association
312-543-7268
robert.mills@ama-assn.org

Wendi Fuller
AT&T Corporate Communications 
214-373-0118
wendi.fuller@att.com

The pancreas folks over at Johns Hopkins recently updated their already fantastic pancreas pathology app within the past week.  Search for "pancreas" in the app store and you would be hard pressed to find more than a couple of apps.

If you have any interests in pancreatic pathology, be it student or practioner, this is a must have app.  Stunning images in the atlas, teaching algorithm derived from the AFIP fascicle and a quiz for self-study.  The over 1400 images in the atlas are high resolution color images of awesome quality with captions covering over 100 entities.  A top notch app which can be found here:

Description provided by developers:

This app is a teaching tool for medical residents, fellows, and practicing pathologists.

The Atlas of Pancreas Pathology is comprised of three modules: an interactive teaching algorithm, a search-able image atlas, and an image-based quiz. Viewing multiple examples of the same entity or feature from this large, rich image atlas will strengthen your diagnostic skills.

Teaching Algorithm. The teaching algorithm is a tool to teach the diagnostic criteria for the most common neoplasms of the pancreas. The algorithm consists of a series of usually dichotomous decision points, starting with determining if the tumor is solid or cystic, which end in specific diagnoses. Gross and microscopic photographs, together with didactic illustrations created by medical illustrator Bona Kim, support the instructional design of the algorithm. The algorithm was adapted with permission from RH Hruban, MB Pitman, and DS Klimstra, Tumors of the Pancreas. Washington D.C.: American registry of Pathology; 2007. Atlas of Tumor Pathology; 4th series, fascicle 6.

Image Atlas. The image atlas contains over 1,400 high resolution color images with captions authored by a leading expert, and covers 115 diagnostic entities. These gross and microscopic photographs can be viewed together or separately, and two entities can be compared, side by side. The atlas can be viewed by diagnosis or by features (these features re-enforce the diagnostic features used in the algorithm), and the atlas can be searched using a key word search. You can create your own albums and add images you select from from the atlas to these albums.

Quiz: The Quiz contains 166 multiple choice questions for self-study.