Frédéric Bodin, a plastic surgeon at Strasbourg University Hospital, is co-founder and Scientific, Ethical and Medical Director of Pixacare, an application for the management and secure storage of medical photos. This solution could save surgeons up to 1.5 hours of medical time per working day.
As part of my job, I was taking over 200 photos of my patients every week with my smartphone. However, I didn't have any tools to sort them quickly and store them safely. In 2018, I entered a healthcare innovation competition with the idea of creating an app to manage my medical photos. That's where I met Matis Ringdal and Vincent Marceddu, who became my partners. The Pixacare prototype we presented at the competition won several prizes.
Then it all came together: in 2019, we set up our company and won our first contracts with hospitals. At the same time, we successfully completed our first fundraising round of 2 million euros. It turns out that the need I had identified concerned all healthcare professionals who use photos on a daily basis.
Pixacare is a medical photo management application available on cell phones and PCs. It enables medical photos to be stored securely on an HDS-certified server, and dissociated from the phone's personal gallery.
The application automates the sorting of photos by date and patient, with the option of adding personalized keywords for better organization. Practitioners identify patients quickly by scanning their hospital label, and access their history with a single click. With the editing tool, you can annotate, crop and zoom to highlight an area or anonymize photos. Finally, the integrated secure messaging system enables healthcare professionals to exchange opinions, messages and photos in total security.
Under the General Data Protection Regulation, healthcare professionals must take steps to protect patients' medical data, including photos taken in a medical setting. Pixacare secures medical photos by storing them encrypted on an HDS-certified server (Hébergeur de Données de Santé) and limiting access to authorized persons.
In addition, Pixacare standardizes the system for storing photos, which previously varied from practitioner to practitioner: smartphone, computer, cloud, hard disk or USB key. Most of these were unprotected media, which could easily be lost. As a result, images were dispersed outside medical files.
Today, Pixacare is deployed in 20 hospitals in France and abroad. More than 35,000 patients and 250,000 photos have been recorded on our application. At head office, the team now numbers 20 employees. In early 2023, Pixacare obtained CE marking for medical devices, meaning that the application complies with the essential requirements set out in European regulations.
Pixacare's mission is to transform the smartphone camera into a medical device. Today, in addition to the photo library, we offer a solution for remote monitoring and documentation of wounds. In the near future, we plan to integrate AI algorithms to measure and analyze wounds. In the longer term, our ambition is for Pixacare to become the must-have application for all hospital teams.
Revue FHF, March-April 2023.
