On her way to Children's Hospital Los Angeles one Saturday in June, pediatric cardiologist Elizabeth R. De Oliveira, MD was paged by the neonatologist at the emergency room of Queen of the Valley Hospital more than 20 miles away. A week-old baby presented with difficulty breathing and a weak pulse. "I couldn't drive from Hollywood all the way to West Covina in time," Dr. De Oliveira said. "I told the neonatologist I am going to make arrangements to get a bed and an ambulance to pick up the baby for transport to a surgical center, and in the meantime get a STAT echo and you can transmit via DIVO."

DIVO (digital images from video output) is a simple medical device that connects to an ultrasound machine and digitizes the echocardiogram so it can be sent over a local area network or the Internet. "It just plugs into the video and audio outputs of the ultrasound machine. The images can be viewed on any Windows computer," said Don Wauchope of Pyramid Medical, which markets the device.

DIVO speeds transmission of critical medical images and sound where needed so specialists can be consulted to initiate intervention right away. (The alternative is that hospitals send videotapes to physicians via messenger.)


While in the parking lot at Children's Hospital Dr. De Oliveira grabbed her laptop computer with mobile broadband card from the trunk of the car. "By the time I went upstairs and was inside the unit...I already knew enough about the baby to start treatment and I alerted the unit to the kind of treatment the baby needed," she said.

Her colleague at Pacific Pediatric Cardiology Medical Group, Robert D. Loitz, MD added, "It eliminates the delay that we would invariably have covering acute care nurseries throughout LA County in being able to immediately diagnose babies with often life-threatening heart disease. Instead of being bumper to bumper on the 10 Freeway, the echo is coming to us at the speed of light ....That can be the difference between living and dying."

Why didn't somebody think of DIVO before? Imaging equipment can certainly provide digital output but it often requires proprietary viewing software from the OEM to interface. The beauty of DIVO is its universal application. "The strength of the system is in its accuracy but really simplicity," Dr. Loitz noted.

"We sold one to UCSD and the doctor had a difficult time buying it because it didn't cost enough," Wauchope said of the economical DIVO. "That's actually what they said. It got all the way up through purchasing and got bumped back because they had just spent a quarter of a million dollars on an OEM system that couldn't do what this does."

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