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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I have a larger issue that no one addressed. There has to be some type of special software for the medical profession that allows you to take a picture on your phone that is not stored on your phone and that you send to the doctor.

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You are asking an unfortunately reasonable question. The fucked up thing is that your normal camera app should suffice for this.

It should suffice if you disable cloud sync and backups.

> There has to be some type of special software for the medical profession that allows you to take a picture on your phone that is not stored on your phone and that you send to the doctor.

No, you shouldn't have to use some special software to take a picture. Taking a photo with your phone's camera app should never trigger an account suspension.

I wouldn’t want private pictures I took just for a doctor to be synced with the cloud provider. It’s not like any of the cloud providers are HIPAA compliant.

The market leader is a system called Epic. It's like the SAP of the medical industry -- universally kind of hated; but it works well enough once set up.

I'm sort of surprised you haven't encountered it yet (and that the people writing responses to your comment haven't either).

Here's a PR piece about their secure video chat feature. (They also support emailing around photos, and the app has a built in camera, but that's old news, and not in their PR blog reel)

https://www.epic.com/epic/post/expanding-telehealth-during-t...

They are doing some interesting stuff with outpatient monitoring and treatment-specific workflows, apparently:

https://www.epic.com/epic/archive/epic-outcomes

You have a better chance of Google just doing the right thing than that happening.

The health sector isn't known for having a secure anything, furthermore getting health companies to agree on one thing together is almost impossible.

Snap chat?

A specific medical oriented app. I’ve had a few virtual appointments where they ask me do I have an iPhone for FaceTime. I do. But what do they do for Android users? Which one of the ten soon to be discontinued Google video conferencing apps would the doctor use?

Here’s an American one used in the UK. That had a data breach exposing sensitive images. I won’t ever trust consumer computers for sensitive medical stuff.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52986629

Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471347

I’m not saying health care companies are competent. I am saying at least they have legal obligations to try to keep your information secure. Google has no such obligation.

Besides, there is less likely of a chance that a medical app targeted toward virtual care for babies would be flagging parents for sending pictures of their children to a doctor.

During COVID I had a digital gp appointment. It was specifically about some skin issues which is obviously difficult to communicate over a phone call.

They required me to send them photos to the receptionist over plain email - I complied because they weren't particularly sensitive parts of my body however it did make me mad that this was their system for dealing with sensitive health data

I have had a few appointments where they didn't ask me about what device I wanted to use at all, just send me a webex link and had me join in a browser.

Works for (almost) all devices.

FaceTime now works for android users, an iPhone can initiate the call and get a shareable link for android users.

They require you to install their own.

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