[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.