THE SUBSTITUTION OF DIGITAL IMAGES FOR DERMATOLOGICAL PHYSICAL-EXAMINATION

Objective: To investigate the diagnostic accuracy of clinicians viewin g a patient's history and static digital image set compared with clini cians who conducted office-based physical examinations of the same pat ients. Design: Observational study. Setting and Patients: One hundred sixteen adult patients presenting with dermatologic symptoms in a univ ersity-based practice who consented to have their skin conditions docu mented with a still digital camera according to a standardized protoco l. Main Outcome Measures: Concordance between office-based dermatologi sts' diagnoses and 2 remote clinicians' diagnoses using still digital images (resolution, 92 dots per inch) and identical medical history da ta to render diagnoses. Results: When photographic quality was high an d office-based clinician certainty was high, remote clinicians were in agreement more than 75% of the time. Office-based and remote clinicia ns were in agreement 61% to 64% of the time for all cases. No specific disease category appeared to be more or less amenable to diagnosis ba sed on still digital imagery. The diagnostic certainty of the office-b ased clinician (reported from 0-10) had the most impact on agreement. When cases with office-based clinician certainty of no more than 7 wer e compared with cases with certainty of at least 9, agreement increase d 54% for remote clinician 1 and 111% for remote clinician 2. As an is olated variable, photographic quality had a modest impact on agreement . Conclusions: Still digital images can substitute for the dermatologi c physical examination in up to 83% of cases. This study provides vali dation of the store-and-forward concept of telemedicine as applied to dermatology. These results serve as the foundation for field testing o f the concept in primary care settings.