App offers fast track for inserting photos into medical record

News When Richard Bruce and Gary Wendt, both professedly “geeks at heart,” assessed the medical imaging landscape in the early 2000s, they were astonished to find that nearly all medical images were being transferred between hospitals on compact discs rather than through the internet.
That was old-school, and not in a good way, says Bruce, who had previously worked at the network giant Cisco Systems. “The transition between Silicon Valley and medical school was like stepping into the dark ages for IT. So many industries had leveraged IT, but medicine lagged behind,” he says.
Today, the product of that astonishment is ImageMoverMD, a Middleton business that Bruce and Wendt founded in 2013 to streamline image processing in hospitals and clinics, and enable quick consultations between specialists. The company makes a smartphone app that, in just seconds, can transmit photos through Epic Systems’ electronic health record system to a secure image archive. The software also works with the Meditech electronic health record system, which dominates in the smaller-hospital market, says Pickard.
Gary Wendt
Both Wendt, the ImageMoverMD president, and Bruce are full-time radiologists at the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “ImageMoverMD would not exist without the concentration of expertise and resources at UW–Madison,” says Bruce, the company’s chief technology officer.
ImageMoverMD can be used by providers and patients alike, using Android and Apple smartphones. The system is integrated into the electronic health record systems for provider use throughout UW Health and Marshfield Clinic.
A second function, the e-Visit, is being piloted for certain UW Health dermatology clinic patients.
The company has six full-time employees at its Middleton headquarters. Wendt and Bruce contribute time after their UW responsibilities are completed.
As the two went through medical school, they continued to wonder about the paucity of IT-driven information exchange in medicine. “Even though UW–Madison was one of the most ...


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