Patient-center care promotes patients taking control of their own health care.

Purview Co-Founder and General Manager Phillip Jackson discusses how patients can take control of their medical outcomes through electronic storage of their medical images.

Jackson explains that Purview can help patients better manage their own health care by:

• Securely storing medical images;
• Providing easy access for second opinions;
• Managing records outside of major health care providers; and
• Sharing images that can be used by doctors for diagnosis and treatment.

[audio mp3="http://www.purview.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Purview-Patient-Centered-Care.mp3"][/audio]

Interview Transcript

Adam Curtis: Here once again with Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and General Manager of Purview, www.purview.net. We’re talking Patient-Centered Care Awareness Month. This might be a new term to some people Phil but the concept is pretty universal right?

Phillip Jackson: Yeah, the concept here is that patients have control over their health care. Health care should not be a black box. It should be something that we as patients can easily interface with. We do have the right to inquire about findings, to question findings and to seek second opinions. We shouldn’t feel locked down with the information we are provided by our health care providers.

AC: That can be hard sometimes because you’re going into a doctor, you have something wrong with you. A little bit of a scary situation and here is a professional giving you their professional opinion. What are ways in which people can advocate for themselves in those situations?

PJ: One of the advances, or the advances, of technology allows patients to take more control than they have in the past. Typically the information about their health care was kept in a manila envelope, you know on a bookshelf behind closed doors. Now our medical records are more than ever available electronically.

The advances in technology are empowering patients to take more control of their health care. It’s a democratization of health care.

AC: Now part of that of that control is seeking second opinions. What are some of the major advantages that one would get out of a second opinion?

PJ: It’s so critically important, especially if we have been provided a negative finding in an imaging study or you know, we have been diagnosed with cancer. It’s amazing how few patients will seek a second opinion.

These tools that we provide, that Purview provides, allow patients to do that easily. Images are stored in the cloud just like our banking statements are stored in the cloud. This information is kept securely, it's protected, and as a patient we can easily engage any of the 3.9 million health care providers in the United States to provide us a consultation.

AC: So you have the ease of access. You have the reach now for second opinions. What are some other benefits for this patient-centered care idea that come with online medical images?

PJ: Other benefits, not just the ability to obtain second opinions, we have the knowledge and the comfort that all of these medical images are holistically managed somewhere other than in the big boxes of health care enterprise. When I say health care enterprise, I mean large health care institutions.

I don’t have a lot of confidence as a patient that a hospital can manage my records effectively and that those records will be available twenty years from now when I may need them. Knowing that, that information is somewhere else, is a welcoming comfort.

AC: Now here in the month of October we are obviously going through a large national discussion about the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare and its mandate for electronic health records. Does Purview play into that discussion at all, with the medical images stored electronically?

PJ: Purview is actually reaching beyond what the Affordable Care Act is stating what should be done by health care providers. The Affordable Care Act identifies our charts, things like notes that a doctor might write about a patient. Less complex records if you will. It mandates that those records be made available to patients. It’s starting to touch on medical imaging being available to patients electronically as well.

We are really trying to push the envelope, enable access to those medical images in the cloud securely. We manage our banking electronically, we should be able to securely manage our health care records and then it allows those images and records to be shared.

AC: I want to go back to this concept of black box. So lets say that we both live here in the Washington, Baltimore area. If I go to Georgetown Hospital and have an image study there, is that not typically transferable to lets say, Johns Hopkins, or another hospital in the area?

PJ: There are things like medical exchanges that are just coming online to share what would, most likely in this case, be a radiology report. In some cases medical images may be made available to other facilities. It's likely that at a higher end facility like Georgetown that you would receive a CD or DVD with your medical images.

It's unlikely a doctor at another facility would be happy with that CD or DVD. In most cases, there is a proprietary image viewer on that CD or DVD that is not of diagnostic quality that might be difficult to use.

When images are sorted in Purview and made available to your health care providers, it's done so using a fully diagnostic FDA approved platform. Which is a huge benefit to health care providers.

With Purview your doctors can look at your images in 2D and 3D, which is typically not available on a CD viewer. So there are a lot of benefits of taking that CD and uploading the contents into a Purview account. And of course it’s very easy to get a Purview account. You can set up one online electronically as easy as you can set up a Gmail account.

AC: And if someone was interested in doing that where could they do it on?

PJ: If a patient is interested in really advocating for themselves, they’re interested and excited about the democratization of health care, that patient should look at www.purview.net . They should sign up for an account.

They should take the stack of CD's that they have with their medical images, upload those CD's. They can call our technical support line if they need help with that. And they will have 30 days of access to that information at no cost.

They can alternatively get a premium account and have access to that information for a year. Another option for you accessing Purview is if you visit one of our participating providers. That will provide you with an access code to Purview when you leave. That access code can be entered into the website and enable online access to those records.

AC: Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and General Manager of Purview. Purview.net. Thanks so much for letting us know how we can take control of our own medical outcomes.

PJ: Thanks for having me here today, Adam.