A recent article details how a new app is helping emergency medicine and other doctors make tricky diagnoses by sharing pictures of their patients with other doctors for help.

You can read the article here:

[How The ‘Instagram For Doctors’ Is Changing How Patients See Specialists](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/instagram-for-doctors_559bfac1e4b04a9c98e83719)

The app, called “Figure 1,” has a couple of purposes. First, it is helpful for newer doctors to get feedback and learn from their experiences. This was the origin of the app, whose creator noticed younger doctors doing just that at Stanford.

Second, the creator is hoping it will help the patients of these doctors, by creating a network of specialists who would be available to review images and consult in real time.

Of course, the main legal issue with any such application is patient privacy. So identifying information of the patient is all carefully removed before posting a picture, and a permission form is explained and signed by the patient.

Still, there may be additional medical / legal complications associated with using the application. Typically, when an emergency medicine, hospitalist, or other first line provider wanted to engage a specialist to help with a patient, the consultation is of a more formal nature. Either the consulting doctor would come see the patient in person, or at least there would be a note in the chart that the doctor had been consulted and what his or her thoughts were.

With this app, if an emergency doctor relies on the expertise of a consulting doctor, and the consulting doctor is wrong, and the results are catastrophic, who should be responsible for the patient’s harm? Has the consulting doctor provided care to the patient sufficient to create a physician-patient relationship? Should an ER doctor rely on a specialist within an app’s network for diagnostic advice? Should the hospital or clinic where the front line provider works have access to an actual consulting specialist?

I agree that the app has promise, and appears inevitable given the age of Instagram, social media, and real time information exchange. However, my sense is that it may be better served as a learning tool for newer providers, and less actually useful for patients.

If nothing else, read the article for example pictures already shared through the app. You can see why a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words.