RE:RE:Good exchange here are my thoughtsHere is the issue:
There are 562 Dermatologists in Canada serving 37,000,000 Canadians. The wait times to see a Dermatologist is between 8-16 months depending on where you live. If you have a nodular melanoma you never get to see the Dermatologists because it will have metastisized to your lungs or brain within 6-8 months. You were fortunate your GP did a punch or scratch biopsy and sent it to pathology for assessment. Not many GP's will do that type of surgery as it leaves a scar and GP's are not very good at reading melanomas that is why they send the patients to a Dermatologist.
Dermatologists spend ~15 minutes per patient and 97% of the patient referrals for melanomas are benign and the Derm did not need to see them. That means the throughput is the issue.
So MedX's device allows more patients to be seen on a timely basis and therfore catch more melanomas. It takes a Dermatologist 2 -5 minutes to read a patient profle and scan according to MedX and this is the same process Radiologists do currently.
There is a problem in Canada in that the billing system isn't set up for this yet so it will have to be private pay until the insurance companies decide to step in. That could either be private like Blue Cross or public like OHIP.
Happy to read you had such an attentive and skilled GP. Hang on to that GP as they are rare.
Hope this helps.