By Neil Versel

Sept. 23, 2008 | It’s certainly not the first Web site to be likened to YouTube for medicine, but Medting.com—formerly called MDPIXX—might just be the first truly global online repository of medical images and multimedia for physicians. The site, developed in Spain, also includes platforms for clinical exchange and telemedicine.

“The idea is to create a Web community,” explains Medting president Miguel Cabrer, a former eHealth coordinator for the Balearic Islands Health Service in who now is an independent health-IT consultant in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

Cabrer, who spoke to Digital HealthCare & Productivity at this month’s inaugural Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, actually sees the site as less of a medical YouTube and more of a multimedia version of Snomed. Indeed, Medting keyword tags are based on Snomed CT terminology, which has become as close as there is to a true, worldwide standard for clinical vocabulary.

The site is free for physicians, and physicians only, who can create public or private groups for peer review, teaching, research, clinical decision support, and seeking second opinions. A telemedicine component, helped by a European Commission grant, is allowing Medting to offer free second opinions to clinicians in developing countries, says Cabrer, a member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) governing council for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

“People are using it for reference at the point of care or to discuss cases among colleagues and residents,” says Barry Chaiken, M.D., a Boston-based health-IT consultant and HIMSS board chair-elect who is informally advising Medting in the U.S. “You can get feedback from other people.”

The site currently is fully rendered in Spanish and English, and is starting to add content in other tongues. Snomed helps by automatically translating keywords for indexing in multiple languages.

A highlighted case this week is in French, from Medting partner Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland. The company also has established relationships with the Catalonia Health Department (Barcelona, Spain) and the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.). Cabrer says Medting currently is looking for a dedicated U.S. distribution channel.

At the Toronto conference, Cabrer presented an iPhone 3G to Mayo Clinic pathologist Keith Kaplan for the best Medting clinical case. Kaplan used Medting to post information and images of a rare tumor called primary pericardial synovial sarcoma.