[Petrushka]

I have the Washington Post from Jan 1, 2000. Below the fold is an article on what the future would hold tech-wise for a child born that day. By 2010, we were all supposed to be wearing wristbands with all of our medical information on it, so doctors would simply have to scan them to gain our history. We also wouldn't have cheap (meaning not thousands upon thousands of dollars) mobile computers with the ability to access the internet from anywhere until 2020.

I can't remember any of the others, but all of the predictions for around now (other then the smartphone one) are completely and totally off. All of these prediction things are bullshit, as most futurist ideas generally are. There's no accountability, because no one will remember the reports. It's ridiculous that the government pays people to write these things, and just as ridiculous that Wired publishes them.

I think SMBC put it best:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1968#comic

[rthomas6]

What is stopping something like the medical wristband thing? Nobody would wear a bracelet like that, but why not an RFID card? That seems like a great idea. What would it take to start something like that?

[MichaelSalib]

Note that this doesn't solve a problem that providers have right now.

For people with serious medical conditions that need to communicate that to EMS, we have physical medalert bracelets that can tell healthcare providers that you have diabetes or epelipsy. That technology works even if your provider doesn't have power or reliable internet.

Most patient provider interactions don't require history transmission because you're at a scheduled office visit or your in emergency care at a facility that is part of your giant local health network. In those cases, providers can look up your name (that they can get from your wallet even if you're not conscious) in their database and find all they need. They don't have to worry about synchronizing data with arbitrary providers and trying to remap their ontologies or deal with lossy translations.

The number of cases where providers need fine grained history information for people that they've never treated before and they need it right NOW and can't afford to wait is...very small relative to the volume of patients treated. I mean, if you've been shot in the chest, the ER is going to focus on keeping you from bleeding to death rather than poring through a history to note that you're allergic to ragweed pollen, have slightly elevated blood pressure and fractured your tibia 8 years ago.

[MichaelSalib]

Security is a big problem. Do you want everyone who gets within 10 feet of you to have access to your complete medical history, name, social security number and insurance information? Then there's the fact that RFIDs can't send much data; you could have them send a UUID that allows doctors to look you up over the internet, but now your wristband is a universal tracking device that allows anyone to track your movements.

Beyond that, a medical history that can't be updated is pretty useless, but our fragmented healthcare system isn't able to agree on standards for electronic medical records or how to synchronize them across different providers. Actually, getting doctors to use EMRs will probably be the work of a generation.

[rthomas6]

The UUID thing I think is a non-issue... RFIDs are already in passports, credit cards, student IDs, etc. Having a UUID on the RFID that is associated with a secure database seems like it would solve this problem.

Then the problem becomes, how do you get doctors and hospitals to use something like this? Creating a private database that providers could optionally use seems doable. The hard part would be creating a large enough percentage of adoption at first. After that, more and more providers would see the benefit of using the system, and patients might even start asking for it, or preferring hospitals that have it.

[pavel_lishin]

HIPAA, for one. If you want to design, build or market anything that deals with patient data, you better build a hoop-jumping machine first.

Reluctance to change, for two. You have to convince most hospitals to change from whatever they have installed now to your system, or you have to make your system 100% compatible with the current hospital systems, with minimal changes.

[duaneb]

+ Privacy.

+ People don't know how good it would be until it's actually used, so adaption would be slow.

+ No real financial gain- health providers just add the cost of bureaucracy into the bill.

So yes, it would be cool/useful, but there's not exactly a huge need for it (and many potential problems).

[rthomas6]

For it to be useful, I think it would have to lessen the bureaucracy of patient records, and decrease medication mistakes by being more searchable and accessible than current record systems. If it were done correctly, I believe there would be a financial gain. Maybe not for the patients, but for the medical care providers.

[duaneb]

I agree, but providers (especially recently) have been notoriously poor with pricing. I don't see them making an effort unless the entire industry is forced to reduce costs (which it should, hopefully soon!).

[lifeisstillgood]

Firstly it's your data so the better question is really why don't I have a web page with my medical records encrypted on them and key sign my local doctors when he wants to update them

This is a much much better way round, but two things hold it back - well three.

1. Key sign? PKi? Wtf?

2. Doctors actually don't want many records to be available to the patient - it frankly compromises medical care (heard the phrase GOMER - Get Out Of My ER. Much diagnosis is still hunch and guesswork - and needs to be carefully phrased If patient will read it

3. We still think something centralised should track all our medical care when really something decentralised is much much better

[psweber]

You really sucked the fun out of that.

[Petrushka]

There are so many awesome and fascinating things being made and discovered now. I don't see why you need to go and make some ridiculous predictions about the future to be inspired as to where technology is leading us.