Medical Smart Cards
This article is pretty interesting to me.
Low-income residents of the New York City borough of Queens are taking active roles in their healthcare by carrying their personal health records on chip-embedded "smart cards," public hospital officials have reported.A few years ago I helped some guys develop a prototype of a similar system in an effort to get some venture capitalist money for them to develop a full fledged system. Basically all I did was build an application that looked like it worked to display the concept, but it was very interesting stuff. Sadly, I think the timing (2001) was against them getting any VC money and I haven't heard anything from them in a long time now, although for a while they would send me letters on their progress. Too bad it didn't succeed and make a pile of money. Would have been nice.
posted by Dave Justus | 9/24/2004 02:39:00 PM
2 Comments:
I've worked on these things myself. My writer and cards are still in the closet. If you ask me - it would be far better for these guys to carry a floppy disk around with them. You get far more information on them and every computer already supports floppy disks. There are just so many different types of smart cards today that it is hard to be compatable with certain ones. And what ever happend with that idea of a centralized database containing medical records?
While a centralized database makes a whole lot more sense and would be a lot easier to build to many people have concerns about privacy issues for it to be likely that such a think would be accepted.
I expect that eventually things will evolve in that direction though.
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