Implantable medical information

Ok so i was talking to a GP and we talked about microchips and how they could be used in the health service. One thing that came up is that paramedic crews don't know what medication/illnesses people have. however if we heavily advised and fully subsidized having a 8 kb microchip implanted in the same place in everybody and then trained paramedics to read the chips immediately every time then we could solve this problem.

an 8kb microchip can hold 2,000 characters. if we set it up so that the first character denoted your class out of 36 possibilities, this would be denoted by the numbers 0-9 and letters a-z. that would tell the software what the next set of characters mean. say if you where a type (1), this would denote you are ordinary with nothing exceptionally wrong (like diabetes or do not resuscitate), so question 1 would be are you on any blood thinners? there are two possible answers to this (a or b) denoting which one you are on the next character denotes your dosage on a scale of 1-36 (0) being minimal (z) being exceptionally high. so then you would have as many questions as needed in your class (only the answer need be in the chip as they will all follow the same standard).

Why have previous attempts at this failed

they haven't been implantable chips and they haven't been funded by the NHS therefore the paramedics don't scan.

Why generally

in the UK all of the NHS services use different clinical systems, this means that paramedics don't know what medicines people are on and what medicines they are allergic to. For instance if they are called to someone with sepsis they give them penicillin but they wouldn't if they could have scanned the microchip and know they where allergic to it they would have given them another medicine with similar effects.

Comments

  • Good luck with convincing people to get implants.

    Sadly biohacking is still extremely marginal, the vast majority of people would instantly reject the idea of an implant.


    But other than that, yeah it would work easily.
  • mmm two things a) my mums a doctor so I have contacts ;) b) also  this would really help as in genuinely the NHS needs a revamp and this could be it b)
  • not to mention the dangers of false/manipulated data.
  • only the GP could upload the data the first 10 letters could be taken up with the patients NHS number, when reading the reader would retrieve a decryption key from a secure database which would then decrypt it, the key could be preloaded if the patients name was already known (and no, knowing the patients name/NHS number does not mean that the paramedics have access to the GP records they are on different systems) whenever the GP changes anything the chip would be updated if the GP's are conspiring you're already dead.
  • edited August 2017
    @tasty No trying to put down your idea (it's fantastic on paper), but having contacts wont do much good for something this big/radical.

    Realistically, for this idea to work, you need a pretty high % of implantees. If the % is too low, checking for a chip will, on average, only waste precious time and therefore render the plan irrelevant.

    And that brings us to the crux of the issue: right now, nothing will convince the majority of the population to get implants. It's simply too radical of an idea to work. We know the technology is there and it would work fine, but society just isnt ready to accept it.


    Basically, in our current political/moral/etc landscape, there is 0 chance that an implant like you propose will be adopted widely enough to make the system functional.

    Plus, it's not like you can force people to get the implant either... Bodily integrity isnt violable. 




    That being said, I'd jump on the occasion to get such a chip! Shit, I could even add a tattoo on the implant site with something like "Scan for medical history".
    Damn you society! Why cant we have nice things?!
  • Something like a medical alert bracelet or card would probably be more acceptable to the general public.

    https://www.tap2tag.me/shop/medical-tags.html

    I can think of problems with having too much information available to anyone with the right scanner though.
     
  • yeah but you have to remember a tag, also we have these things called NHS numbers they identify us on GP records, the device could establish a secure connection to a server which would then send it back the decryption key for that person the readers would be locked with passwords to prevent unauthorised access.
  • although it is a shame that there would be opposition, then again it will be a slow battle we just have to keep mentioning it.
  • If you're connecting to a remote server, you don't need to store anything more than the NHS number.
    If you are working in areas where the server can't be reached, then you need to store the relevant history for first aid like allergies and current prescriptions.
    It might also be handy ::snicker:: if a doctor could write patient prescriptions on the tag so they could be filled at the pharmacy where the patient would be scanned again. That way scripts couldn't be passed off as easily.

  • Ha ha ha, the NHS doesn't work like that. you see the hospital the paramedics and the GP's all use different systems. Some (like my local) hospitals only keep paper records, they have now started to use a system where you can view a patients GP records (considered the most complete) but not edit, so when I get admitted to hospital for a broken hip that isn't updated in the GP records not even that I was unresponsive to X painkiller. And when I get picked up by the paramedics with sepsis they don't know I'm allergic to penicillin until they get back, the hospital retrieves my records and then realise that I'm on penicillin before switching over by which time I'm pumped full of the stuff. NHS it is a mess and too much money has been thrown at it. This system would be completely separate.
  • You can still centralize the system and have everyone uses it.

    Heck, it would even fix the problem of "GP A did not know patient is already on benzos because can't access their records and patient has no idea".
Sign In or Register to comment.