Michael Millenson reports on second thoughts from our CIO, John Halamka, about implantable chips for patient medical information. John is quoted as saying, "The implanted RFID chip is not as a society where we’re going.” There always was that problem, too, about being designated as a garden hose when he would walk out of Home Depot!
Bravo to John for always pushing the envelope and for his honesty about the efficacy of attempted innovations in the IS arena.
Agreed.
ReplyDeleteI added this comment on TheHealthCareBlog (aka Land Of A Thousand Opinions, heh):
"I too suspect John was/is just ahead of his time.
"My day-job industry, software delivered over the Web, is all the rage right now. (Specifically we do appointment systems but I'm talking about the underlying technology.) Some call it Cloud Computing, some call it SaaS (software as a service). Ten years ago it was called ASP, and it died. Absolutely the right idea, but ahead of its time.
"Fwiw, my gut tells me we are *certainly* going to end up literally carrying our medical information in some machine-readable form. But that will happen once we can be sure it's accurate. :)"
And, I might add, when hospitals have the ability to read whatever format it is.
I'm starting to think that the most useful, most solvable use case (and data subset) is "WYNTKAMIE": What You Need To Know About Me In Emergencies.
Hmmm.... that was a wisecrack, but John's an ER doc; I wonder if such a subset could indeed by crowdsourced by ER staff. And EMTs.