In this day and age, you can easily share photos through Dropbox, notes in Evernote, or spreadsheets via Google Drive with anyone. But good luck helping two doctors at two different hospitals to see the same patient records online. Instead, when a patient goes to a medical center for the first time, they often have to repeat tests they've undergone before—such as a computerized tomography (CT) scan, which uses X-ray technology to produce cross-sectional images of the body.
"The holy grail of medical informatics right now is to have a cloud-based place where patients' info can live," says Dr. Alexander Baxter, an assistant professor of radiology at NYU who practices at Bellevue and NYU hospitals in Manhattan. "So that if you go to one hospital, and you get a CT scan and you go to another hospital, you don't have to get the same CT scan again. This happens all the time at Bellevue." That doubles the cost and the dose of radiation.
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