BUSINESSTiny implant puts portable medical records in reachThe technology would allow physicians and medical personnel access to personal and medical records in cases where patients are unconscious or otherwise noncommunicative.By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. April 24, 2006. A small but increasing number of people are getting a portable health record in an intimate way -- by having a computer chip implanted in their arms. When read by a scanner, the chip, the size of a grain of rice, would give an identification number physicians and hospitals would use to log on to a secure Web site containing that patient's identification and medical information. The chip and technology is produced by VeriChip, whose corporate parent owns another company -- Digital Angel --that has sold 6 million similar chips implanted in dogs and cats since 1991. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson is a VeriChip board member and has pledged to get himself "chipped." Advocates of the chips say they represent a huge advance in patient safety. The idea is that having the chips will help physicians, particularly those in emergency departments, in cases where a patient is unconscious, unable to communicate or unable to remember, say, what medications he or she is taking. Privacy advocates worry, though, that the chips could be used to track people without their consent or otherwise misused by people who have access to information gleaned from the chip. Also, ethics experts are cautioning physicians to not make chip implantation a mere money-making operation. VeriChip's preferred way of distributing chips to patients is by having doctors buy the chips then re-sell them through their offices. Physicians selling the chip who were contacted by AMNews said they were, at most, charging no more than what they paid VeriChip for it. [...]Full text of American Medical News content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2006 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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