In this recent episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat series, I sat down with Peter Birch, General Manager (Asia Pacific) at MetaOptima Technologies & host of the “Talking HealthTech Podcast.” We discussed a whole range of topics, including Peter’s professional journey and the work he is doing with the Australian HealthTech community. We also explored the roles of AI, advanced analytics, and telehealth in advancing patient care and improving outcomes, both in the Asia Pacific region and worldwide.
Here is a sneak peek of the start of our conversation:
Q: Can you tell us more about what MetaOptima does and your business model?
A: Sure! So, we make technology to help doctors diagnose and detect skin cancer using artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. We make two products predominatly–actually a few more now–but predominantly DermEngine, which I guess is our core product. DermEngine is a software platform. It is a cloud-based system that you, as a clinician, can connect to your practice management system or EMR, the system you use in the clinic, to manage the workflow of doing a skin check. It is focused right now on skin cancer because that’s a workflow that normally, for it to be done well, requires imaging and mapping of these lesions on the body map and other bits and pieces, which are usually pretty hard to do in terms of a consult-based EMR when you’re monitoring a lesion over 3 or 4 years; you do not want to be scrolling through 3 or 4 years of notes to find when you took a picture of this particular spot.
So being able to map images on DermEngine of your moles or suspicious lesions, having it available to the clinicians, but also enabling a patient app too. Patients are able to download the MoleScope app and take their own images of their lesions and then have that sent across through to their clinician to then have that monitoring done from a distance as well. This was all pre-COVID that we were building this out. So predominantly, on a day-to-day, it is used by clinicians to manage skin checks. Now, more broadly, by dermatologists to manage other dermatology issues as well…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Peter Birch, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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