Your doctor gives you scans. On a CD that no device reads anymore. Or in a patient portal that expires after 90 days. Or now: in a public health app or national patient record platform.
These platforms work for many people. But not for everyone.
If you want to decide yourself who can access your scans, reports and doctor's letters — and who cannot — you previously had no good option. That has changed.
The problem with existing options
The CD is the fossil of medical IT. No modern laptop has a drive anymore. The content is stored in a format (DICOM) that standard operating systems cannot open.
The patient portal solves the problem for 90 days. Then it expires. The images are gone — or you have to go back to the practice and request another CD.
National health platforms (NHS app, My Health Record, national patient portals) are more permanent. But they run on infrastructure you don't own. Who exactly has access, what data is analysed and what happens with this data in 10 years — these are legitimate questions without satisfying answers for many patients.
What Nextcloud does differently
Nextcloud is file management that runs on your own server. Your server. Your access. No third party.
For medical images there is a DICOM add-on integrated directly into Nextcloud. This means: you upload your X-rays once — and can then open them in the browser, zoom in, share them with your next doctor (via a secure link, not an email attachment) and store them permanently.
No expiry date. No cloud provider outside your jurisdiction. No access by third parties except those you explicitly invite.
Who this works for
This solution is for patients and caring relatives — people who want to manage their own records or those of family members. An elderly parent with many specialists where no one keeps the overview. A chronic condition with years of imaging history. Getting a second opinion that needs a complete imaging history.
Important: for clinical applications — where a doctor or institution uses these images for diagnostic purposes — certified medical device software is required. That is not what we describe here.
Solutions that make this possible