Carry your medical records on a USB drive
- 13 April 2005
A biochemistry professor has developed a USB key chain so that people can carry around their own electronic medical records downloaded from their doctor’s record system.
The MedInfo Chip (right), developed by Dr Carl Franzblau, chairman and professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine, is essentially a key drive that incorporates all the software needed to view patient records on any USB compatible PC or Mac.
Dr Franzblau deliberately decided not to password-protect the viewing of records on the system. "In an emergency, which is what you really want this for, if you can’t express the security numbers or the password you have got a problem," he told E-Health Insider.
"There’s really no big secrets. You don’t want to put something down, you don’t put it down. You have a box at the bottom that says, ‘For other medical conditions, please phone my doctor.’"
To download records from a compatible medical records system, the chip is inserted into the doctor’s machine, a password is entered and the data is transferred. Should the user wish, they can opt not to put certain records on the system.
Should the patient have a medical emergency, the chip can be inserted into the USB port of the clinican’s computer. When the welcome screen appears, there is an option that allows anybody see a summary of the patient’s records in an emergency; i.e. name, height, weight, medication, allergies, current conditions and so on. "The bottom line is that when you are dealing with your own health, you want to be able to display this," says Dr Franzblau.
If the patient does not have a doctor with a compatible system, their records can be updated manually. Dr Franzblau stressed that the software is modelled on a kiosk system and has been made as user-friendly as possible. Up to nine photographs can be stored on each chip, and JPEG optimisation software is built in.
The MedInfo Chip was inspired by the tendency of many people in the US with long-term conditions, especially the elderly, to carry around slips of paper in their wallets explaining what medications they were on. Franzbrau said that the product was particularly popular by what he termed as "the sandwich generation".
"Children of elderly parents in their seventies fill this out, so their parents have all their records. Then, if you have children that have special needs, they can have their medical info as well. When you put it all together, people think that they might as well keep their own records on the chain, too."
As his next project, Dr Franzblau is looking into the possibility of adding RFID tags to the system, so that Alzheimer’s patients can be tracked and identified should they wander out of the reach of care.
The MedInfo Chip can be carried in a card, on a keyring or a necklace, and comes in 64Mb and 128Mb versions. The models are on sale for $69.99 (£40) and $99.99 (£55) respectively.
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