Walmart All In On Your Medical Records
Recently, Walmart has been in talks to acquire Humana. Now they were awarded a patent for a system that would store a person’s medical information in a blockchain database. “The patent, issued last week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, describes three key parts to the system: a wearable device in which the blockchain is stored; a biometric scanner for an individual’s biometric signature; and an RFID scanner to scan the wearable device, ideally a bracelet or wrist band.”
Who here feels like a commodity now? I sure do.
“According to the patent, first responders would scan the device to access an encrypted private key. They would decrypt that using the biometric identifier and, with a second public key, retrieve the victim’s records.”
Yeah, not so sure about that. What a patent says and what it is eventually is used for can be two totally different things. Go back to the Humana possible acquisition. How will this data be used to help Humana? Do you want them to have and, maybe, sell your data? Does blockchain make this data safer? Will they be doing “price checks” on humans?
I am a little afraid of this information. Are you?
From a pharmacist’s viewpoint, there is an advantage in that patients that doctor shop will have interactions that will display via the computer programming. Did I dream that I saw this happen recently?
Walmart recently began requiring physicians to put the diagnosis codes on the prescription for any chronically prescribed controlled substance. I send my patients to a different pharmacy now.
Why worry ? Like most medical tech products, it likely will be more trouble than it is worth.
Isn’t it about time for some patient’s rights group to bring a big lawsuit claiming that patients have the right to demand that their data not leave the physician’s office without their permission?
They have left out the part about personal chipping of the
herd animalpatients. That and videotaping the health encounter. All this will be normal by 2020Humana wantsto know how sick you are to plan actuarial premiums/risk for their own financial gain. Your privacy is lost. And we all know what crap can be on your list in the EMR with multiple “team members” changing things. I had an NP do a home visit on my patient (for capturing chronic care diagnoses of course) and label her with HIV instead of HSV because she takes valtrex. Really increased the RAF score.
More scariness.
Wait until the health industry begins sequencing bacterial and viral subtypes, in order to produce a chronological transmission map. Once you ID the infectious agent, you can identify the human transmitters when they seek care.
This works for identifiable clones of pathogens such as the STD’s like HIV. Maybe it’s happening now.
Perhaps by neutralizing people with defective behavior that makes them frequent vectors for STD’s, we can cull them from the herd. It sounds nearly reasonable, if you don’t think too hard about it.
Interesting choice of words to describe a patient with the device: “victim”