It looks like you're in .
Like to go to the PicSafe site?
Dear PicSafer
At PicSafe®, we believe in helping doctors and health care providers to deliver better patient care. We know that when doctors use their smartphones to take photos and record video or audio, they can provide better patient outcomes but with this comes huge security, privacy and regulatory implications. The risk of litigation has led some doctors to forego the use smartphone for capturing patient information.
We created PicSafe® to help mitigate the possibility of privacy breach litigation, to improve patient care, to make treatment more efficient, and to save lives. The PicSafe® App is simple-to-use with a beautiful design. It allows doctors to securely: capture, send and store patient consented photos, videos and audio safely and efficiently.
The free app assists individual doctors, clinics and hospitals to better document a patient's status, facilitate a better referral process, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. The free version (PicSafe® Basic) has been designed to be fully functional and will suit the needs of most users. Power users can also upgrade to PicSafe® PRO which has some advanced features.
We also have enterprise options for hospitals so they can allow their doctors to comply with patient privacy regulations when taking clinical photos and deliver what is now considered the standard of care.
We hope you love the app as much as we do and we welcome any and all feedback to help make PicSafe® even better.
Kind regards,
PicSafe® Co-founders
The Story Behind PicSafe
Since the invention of the smartphone, doctors have been taking photos of patients and sending this information to other health professionals. The concept for a dedicated app was hatched in 2012 after two surgeons recognised both the amazing benefits but serious risks of this practice. An app that captures the data and stores it securely in the cloud, they thought, would minimise the risk and increase the benefits. They approached an app development company to build the app which became known as PicSafe Medi. PicSafe Medi was designed for individual doctors to take photos and have them stored securely in the cloud (rather than on their device). Although well received, a lack of awareness of the risk of privacy breaches and concern over data costs on the mobile networks led to hampered adoption. There was considerable interest from hospitals however they required photo storage on their servers. Unfortunately, due to the cost of maintaining secure storage of photos for 7 to 25 years (to comply with regulations), funding ran out, and in early 2015 the company shut down, and all parties amicably went their separate ways.
In a post mortem, Dr Ted Carner (one of the founders of PicSafe Medi), and Raef Akehurst (one of the founders of the app development company) discussed what they would have done differently. It was here that the idea for PicSafe® 2.0 began. Rather than sending photos to a central server, the app would generate a "report" and encrypt the data directly on the phone. The report can then be sent via email, uploaded to a third party storage service (Box or Dropbox), or transmitted directly to a hospital's server and integrated into a patient's medical record. This way we would not have to maintain storage of any patient data (which hospitals did not want anyway). And, it gave us the ability to add video and audio files!
As a little more time passed, awareness of the privacy regulations has increased. Individual trusts could face penalties of up to £500,000 if breaches lead to substantial damage or distress to patients. (£3,000,000 in privacy fines were issued in 2016.) This has lead to hospitals starting to reach out, looking for a solution. Along with the increased quality of cameras on smartphones, the increased processing power of phones (for generating PDFs and encrypting reports on the device) and a decreasing mobile data costs, the time seemed right to re-start PicSafe®.
PicSafe® Is Born
PicSafe® is a simple, quick, and secure smartphone app-based system which enables healthcare professionals to safely capture, transmit, and securely store patient-consented clinical photos, video and audio.
Compatible with iOS and Android devices, PicSafe® meets patient privacy and government regulatory requirements surrounding the capture, use, and storage of medical photographs, video and audio.
By using PicSafe® on a smartphone, healthcare professionals can quickly and efficiently document a patient's status, considerably improving the efficiency of the medical referral process and, ultimately, improving patient outcomes. All captured data is patient-consented, photos are watermarked to assure authenticity, and all access is logged to provide an audit trail.
PicSafe® is "the missing link" in smartphone clinical photography.
Excellent patient care and surgical outcomes flow from multidisciplinary teamwork, the success of which is highly dependent on effective, timely communication between individual team members. The value of a quality clinical photo to both clinician and patient is often immeasurable in such scenarios.
Founders
Dr Ted Carner
MD, MPH, FAAD, FACD
Theodore Carner, MD, MPH, FAAD, FACD has trained at multiple diverse institutions throughout his academic career. These include Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business (BBA Summa Cum Laude), Northern Arizona University Sciences (equivalence BS Chemistry), University of Arizona College of Medicine (MD), and Johns Hopkins University (Fellowship and MPH).
He served for several years in the international public health arena, as a resident medical officer out in the Western Pacific Island region under the auspices of the US Congressional 177 Health Care Program. He also served as Fire Surgeon for the Phoenix Fire Department for many years while maintaining a private surgical dermatologic practice in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area.
Most recently he has served as Clinical Supervisor of Dermatologic Surgery at Monash Medical and maintaining a part-time private surgical practice in the Melbourne, Australia. Ted is currently using New Zealand as a base, where he and his wife Robin enjoy raising their three school-age children and is lending his time and expertise to clinics in various developing countries.
Raef Akehurst
BBus(Hons), MMktg
Raef is the founder of Slay, a Melbourne based indie mobile app developer and consultancy. Slay works with a handful of long-term clients (Global Health, UbiPark and Team App among others) as well as building apps for itself.
Raef previously Co-founded ProjectProject, a Melbourne-based agency. Growing the team to 24 people before selling he worked on a variety of projects for clients including ArtsHub, Australian Unity, FetchTV, Isuzu, Nexvet, PetSure, Sabco, Save the Children, Salmat, Smiling Mind and various Federal and State government departments.
Before that, Raef spent six years with famous3D on its renowned "facial animation" products. He managed the development of software used in numerous movies (Lord of the Rings), games (Enter The Matrix), and on smartphones (NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile).
Raef was top of his Bachelor of Business (Honors) class and has a Masters of Marketing from Monash University. He's a self-taught programmer and has over 18 years of programming, product management, product development, and marketing experience in both in Australia and Canada.