Google Glass app for documenting surgeries

Silicon Valley start-up Drchrono has launched its

"wearable health record" Google Glass app, with the company's co-founder Daniel Kivatinos telling The Irish Times that some doctors intend to use the technology as they perform surgeries.

Using the app, with a patient’s permission, doctors can record surgeries or consultations, allowing them to save Glass-recorded videos, images and notes directly to the patient’s electronic medical records.

Kivatinos explains that running the software on Glass will allow users to record procedures by simply saying “Okay Glass, take a picture.” This, he says, will allow doctors to continue their work without having to: “stop surgery, take off the surgical gloves, get out their high-quality camera, take a picture, then disinfect their hands again and put another pair of surgical gloves on”.

For the moment the app is free for Glass-owning doctors, though Drchrono’s established Mac, PC and iPad versions of its electronic records software currently go from free versions to a high-end package costing over €330 a month.

Kivatinos says demand from the US medical industry to use Google Glass is taking off. “We have had 300-plus doctors requesting access to the Drchrono Google Glass wearable health record out of our 65,000-plus physician user base,” he adds.

File-sharing heavyweights Box invested an undisclosed amount in Drchrono last year and provide secure storage of patient documents.

John Muldoon, one of the developers behind Sicknosis, a patient-focused mobile web portal trialled by GPs last year which is no longer running, says he wasn't sure there would be the demand for such technology in Irish medical settings as doctors here are more conservative than their counterparts in the US.

There is, he adds, “likely to be resistance” from some patients to being recorded. However, Muldoon says he could see many potential uses for the Drchrono platform, “not least in areas of mentoring, training and education”.

Google announced earlier this week that it was handing Glass at Work certification to a separate medical-record start-up, the San Francisco-based Augmedix which is specifically focused around Glass and has raised over €5.3 million in funding since its launch in 2012.

Using Glass, Augmedix records relevant data for a doctor while they speak with a patient, as well as presenting previous patient data via the device. Four other companies – in the areas of sport, culture, media and enterprise solutions – were also confirmed this week as the first Glass at Work partners from a list of hundreds of applicants.