The mobile and web application that digitally shares breast images sought a managed cloud services provider to operationalize compliance and ensure patients' private health data remains safe and secure. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Without past, difficult-to-transfer breast imaging data, patients may experience additional radiation exposure and unnecessary tests — a void Send Mammogram was launched to fill.

Historically, mammography facilities struggled to share mammograms, breast ultrasound images and MRIs, but access to a patient's image history is essential to make an accurate diagnosis and speed up access to care.

Send Mammogram has found a way through mobile technologies that put the patient in the driver's seat, getting their images in front of the radiologist reading their latest breast images.

Tillata Gibson, Send Mammogram founder, started her career as a mammography technologist and saw how the unaddressed problem of a lack of imaging data increased the risks of catastrophic complications in prevention and breast cancer care. 

Send Mammogram's secure mobile app and dedicated enterprise mammography image-sharing platform aims to enable better outcomes by empowering patients to easily share mammogram images and results with diagnosticians and providers. 

The platform facilitates image transfers with digital signatures that provide traceability, confirm receipt and ensure the long-term availability of the image data. 

Patients can request breast health images from mobile devices be sent to mammography facilities or directly. 

Mammography facilities receiving images via Send Mammogram can automate workflows previously tethered to receiving and managing faxed paperwork and CDs.

By leveraging ClearDATA's CyberHealth platform, Send Mammogram has been able to go beyond the standards of HIPAA and HITRUST compliance for patients and providers, according to the announcement. 

"The embraces I've received from mammography coordinators and the positive feedback from radiologists when introducing them to Send Mammogram's solution tells me our work will make an impact and improve women's healthcare," Gibson said in the statement. 

"Now, with ClearDATA, we're able to advance our vision of making it simpler than ever for women to request and share their mammogram images — enhancing health outcomes while keeping patient data entirely secure." 

THE LARGER TREND

Image sharing has long been a challenge to interoperability, with patient-supplied CD-ROMs proving a clunky, unreliable mode of transfer. Image-enabled personal health records and medical image exchange networks are two ways that the healthcare industry is moving away from relying on patients or other providers to mail or upload images. 

Recently, Intelerad acquired Life Image, and the merged company now manages more than 80 million images worldwide. 

In a discussion last year on the development of image exchange networks and standards with Healthcare IT News, Dave Cassel, executive director of Carequality, addressed the healthcare industry's barriers to image transfer.

"What is missing in terms of making this work on a national scale has been more the governance, the trust and the infrastructure to connect networks," he said.

ON THE RECORD

"We're proud to partner with an organization like Send Mammogram, doing so much good for breast care," Rick Froehlich, ClearDATA CEO, said in the announcement. 

"We can think of no better mission and are thrilled that ClearDATA's managed health cloud services have provided Send Mammogram with the highest confidence that sensitive patient data will remain private as they continue the important work of modernizing women's healthcare." 

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.