More thoughts on the peer-to-peer advantage for healthcare (more specifically: radiology)
1. Radiology Manager is a peer-to-peer teleradiology solution built on the Groove platform
2. Radiology Manager addresses shortage of radiologists (problem worldwide) by using the Internet to best advantage
3. In comparison with the Web ie a client-server approach, the advantages of Radiology Manager are:
- security of records is so much easier
- supports the interaction of radiologists and radiographers online better than the Web ever could - Groove presence, chat and alerts are fundamental, built-in collaboration capabilities
- team radiology - all additional tools for collaboration built in eg threaded discussions
- voice is built in
- automatic image synchronization with no user intervention - means that radiologist and radiographer views stay constantly in sync - no click and wait especially over narrowband. You can wake up in the middle of the night and analyze the CT study instead of waking up, clicking on the link and waiting 47 minutes for the study to arrive (yawn) ...
- the user interface is much richer than that of the Web browser, meaning that the user experience is less hassle, more flexible, more satisfactory
- the work can be taken offline and resynced online later - the Web just can't do this!!
- longer term: real-time synchronous image analysis - navigate together: magnify an image in location A and its simultaneously magnified in location B .... and C, D, E etc - the Web just can't do this!!
- longer term: distributed 'grid' computing
- eg. automatically collate and distribute information on infectious diseases and other statistics from Radiology Manager clients the wide world over
- eg. utilise the Radiology Manager worldwide grid for automatic comparisons and analysis - cf Oxford grid mammography challenge - can't do these things on a 'server' *must* use the grid.
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no need to run to the IT department - you can get this up and running for your department in minutes
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when a user changes a shared file, only the changes are transmitted across the workgroup rather than the whole file which conserves bandwidth.
11:54:57 AM 
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