VisualShare - communicate with pictures - software solutions for image sharing and collaboration. VisualShare builds applications for organizations that need to share images, conduct reviews and document results.

Mike Gotta in his blog Collaborative Thinking brought up an interesting topic on "Presence" in his blog Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button. Most people know presence by way of instant messaging. They log-in to their instant messenger or chat application and their "presence" appears to all other users in their "buddy list". For the most part this is where it ends. However, it need not end there.

I have just confirmed that VisualShare will have a booth at the International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN) 15th annual conference October 17-20 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I recently read an Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal by Bill Gates. In the same issue there was an article about how Microsoft is creating a Web portal called HealthVault.com to store people's medical information.

The Op-Ed article was right-on (IMHO) in its conclusion that primary care and prevention are the keys to reducing medical care costs and improving health care outcomes. Note that healthcare costs are the highest in the US when compared to all industrialized nations while healthcare outcomes are far from the highest--meaning that the US pays much more money for lower quality healthcare.

I question, however, whether or not HealthVault is what we need. I certainly agree that a person's patient information is their property, however, it is not clear to me that HealthVault anything beyond a storage mechanism for healthcare data. The marketing hype for HealthVault talks about sharing patient data with a variety of medical providers by having the medical provider interact with HealthVault.

I am always amazed at the usefulness of Wikipedia and I am certain that I do not scratch the surface.

Laboratory use of VisualStrata imaging collaboration system leverages the value of FISH (or Fluorescent in situ hybridization) images (sample image).

VisualStrata not only provides a persistant storage of the images--necessary because the fluorescent markers decay over time--but a catalog of the present and ongoing knowledge-base of the images.

A recent article in CytoJournal on the Introduction of the Thin Prep Imaging System™ (TIS) illustrates a not-so-obvious use-case for VisualStrata™. During the evaluation of TIS cytotechnologists reviewed the image as well to see how well TIS (and the cytotechnologists!) were doing in interpreting images for detecting cervical cancer.