Patient Spotlight: When Image Sharing is Borderless

Our Patient Spotlight Series allows us to share stories from people in our community who have used PocketHealth to make positive changes in their lives. This week, we sat down with Jeanne, a patient from northern Ontario who used the service to share her scans with a doctor in Costa Rica who helped her find relief from persistent pain 

Jeanne didn’t realize just how life-changing PocketHealth could be until she was on a much-needed vacation in Costa Rica in late 2021.Jeanne was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. After years of treatment, which included chemotherapy, radiation and hormone therapy, she was facing a new challenge in the form of persistent knee, back and hip pain that was slowly reducing her ability to walk. Her medical history required so many scans that she couldn’t remember them all. Jeanne’s daughter had been urging her to sign up for the service that allows patients to easily access their medical images from anywhere in the world. “My daughter is a nurse and she kept saying, ‘It’s really great for you because you always have your test results right there, they don’t have to ask for it.’

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As soon as she took her daughter’s advice, Jeanne gained instant access to the images her doctors have been looking at for years. “I found it very friendly,” she said of the PocketHealth website. “My daughter uses it all the time for her kids. If you’re not a medical person, you don’t understand but at least you can bring it to a medical person. I found it quite easy to access.” She soon discovered it’s just as easy to share those images with others. “So, I’m booked to go see my son who owns a retirement home in Costa Rica,” she said. “About two or three weeks before my trip, he says, ‘Mom, can you send me all your scans?’” She made her way to PocketHealth and quickly obliged, unaware that she was already on the road to feeling better. “We get there and he says, ‘Mom, on Monday you’re seeing a doctor. You don’t have to agree to anything, he’ll just talk to you.’ Everything was based on the scans here.”

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The trip soon revealed that a new set of eyes on an old set of scans can make a world of difference. The doctor in Costa Rica was able to diagnose Jeanne’s condition and offer an innovative form of treatment that provided relief from the pain that was making her life increasingly unbearable. “Because of PocketHealth, I was able to get all the help that I needed,” she said. “They finally told me what was wrong after five years.”Now that she’s back home and feeling better, Jeanne marvels at how far things have come since the days when she would write to the hospital requesting access to results from a specific scan. “When I first got hurt in 2018, it was a whole big rigmarole,” she said. “My daughter was here — she was trying to access the MRI and couldn’t access it. It became a nightmare. Now it’s not a nightmare, it’s an email.

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Since taking control of her health, Jeanne said she no longer feels like her options are limited to the nearest hospital. “I’m in northern Ontario,” she said. “If I decide that I want to go to Toronto — now that I know how useful PocketHealth is — I can go there and have everything at hand. You can go wherever you want. 

“It’s the best thing I’ve heard in healthcare in a long time. It’s a godsend, honestly.”

PocketHealth is putting hundreds of thousands of patients just like Jeanne back in charge of their healthcare journey by giving them easy online access to all their medical imaging and making it a breeze to share this information with doctors and care providers around the world. To access your medical imaging and records, please click here.