I have mostly worked for large corporations over the years, so it’s exciting when I get a chance to help out a small business. These smaller organizations often lack the resources to manage the information systems that are critical to their operations. There are usually opportunities to make a meaningful impact with minimal cost and often share with other organizations which is rewarding.

While working with a local Veterinary hospital, I noticed potential areas for improvement. Similar to a large hospital, they need to work with X-ray or Ultrasound imagery on premise. This hospital has an X-ray machine connected to a local server with purchased software that handles the communication with the equipment via proprietary protocols. Unlike a large hospital the capital investment ends there, and although more robust solutions are available its unlikely additional products for integration would be purchased. I found two major gaps:

1. Lack of medical imagery backup and failover
2. Suboptimal workflows for secure search, retrieval and sharing of medical imagery

The current VetViewer server collects the images but can only be accessed by logging onto that PC. We needed to add a component that can index images and provide secure access from any Internet enabled device. Think drop box for medical imagery. The high level system design solution would consist of a remote service for storing and retrieving and a complementary server agent for synching medical imagery from the VetView Server to the Distributed SaaS. This system enhancement will provide both protection from data loss and greatly improve workflow and increase over quality of services.

Although product upgrades or adds on are available for these use cases; they were expensive and included many features that wouldn’t be used. Since this simple but effective solution might be useful to other smaller organizations, certain components will be made available freely alongside the possible expansion of the service to provide multi-tenancy subscription support. Github project to follow…