Siloam Family Health Center Taps VisualDx for Specialist-Level Expertise

Nov. 19, 2008 - PRLog -- Logical Images, Inc., the expert source for visual diagnostic decision support technology and consumer skin health information, today announced that Siloam Family Health Center has deployed VisualDx at its Nashville, TN, clinic to improve the quality of care for more than 8,000 uninsured patients, a majority of whom are refugees and immigrants. Using the VisualDx diagnostic decision support system, the clinic’s physicians, residents, and medical students can quickly build an accurate, patient-centric pictorial differential diagnosis, drawn from thousands of medical images revealing variations in presentation between as well as within diseases. VisualDx provides clinicians access to the specialist knowledge they need to diagnose patients quickly and accurately and, where appropriate, avoid referrals to specialists.

Siloam opened in 1991 as a faith-based, volunteer-driven primary health care clinic committed to caring for an uninsured, underserved, and indigent population. With a staff of 28 and more than 450 volunteers, Siloam utilizes a network of volunteer medical professionals and interpreters to provide a range of health services. Siloam has diagnosed and helped treat patients with various forms of cancer, heart defects, lung disease, and other life-threatening illnesses. A broad range of relationships with area specialists, laboratories, and hospitals makes this extended care possible.

“The burden of poverty and stress of life keep many patients from seeking medical care early and from taking preventative measures, so they usually present with greater disease severity and complicated health needs,” said Dr. Morgan Wills, MD, FACP, staff internist for Siloam Family Health Center. “Having point-of-care access to VisualDx enables our clinicians to diagnose conditions quickly and accurately. This is particularly useful for dermatology issues because there is often a long wait to see a specialist. Furthermore, VisualDx has a large collection of images representing diseases on dark skin that other resources lack. This is particularly useful given the diverse patient population we see in Nashville.”

VisualDx is the only Web-based visual decision support system that merges medical images with clinical information to build a differential diagnosis using problem-oriented search criteria to improve diagnostic accuracy by 120%. VisualDx provides clinical information and more than 17,000 medical images presenting diseases in variation of severity, skin type, age, and passage of time, covering more than 900 diseases, 250 of which are infectious. VisualDx has the largest collection of images of darker-skinned individuals, including black, Hispanic, Asian, Indian, and Native American skin types, which are largely underrepresented in other medical resources.

“Volunteers provide nearly one-third of the patient care at Siloam, and because of this humanitarian effort, patients have access to high-quality health care despite poverty and the cultural and language barriers many  face,” said  Art Papier, MD, Chief Scientific Officer of Logical Images. “We are pleased to provide VisualDx as a resource that can help clinicians to better evaluate and diagnose patients at the clinic.”