Implantable ID Chips

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

In mid-October the Food and Drug Administration approved implanting patients with a radio transmitting chip that could call up their electronic medical records in an emergency. Don’t dismiss this idea as a sci-fi sideshow. Applied Digital, the company that makes the VeriChip, plans to market it directly to office and hospital physicians. You’ll be asked to consider implanting some of your patients with transmitters. You’ll need to weigh the potential benefits against privacy concerns.

The medical application of an implanted ID chip is easy to see: A patient with Alzheimer’s disease might wander away during a lapse in supervision, fall on the sidewalk, and need emergency medical attention. An EMT equipped with Applied Digital’s radio frequency scanner would send energy to the dormant chip so it has enough power to transmit back a unique, 16-digit identification number. That number would be all an EMT needs to access the patient’s medical records in Applied Digital’s secure, Internet-accessible database. Whether the patient merely was disoriented or totally unconscious, all the caregivers who treated that patient would know what they needed to know.

Patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart problems, or cognitive disorders, or who are undergoing complex treatments such as chemotherapy can benefit from the chip, says Dr Richard Seelig, Applied Digital’s vice president of medical applications. Such patients have complicated medical records because they often see multiple physicians and may be taking many medications. “In addition to identity and family contact information, all this information is vital when emergencies related to their chronic diseases or an accident prevent them from providing this information to medical personnel,” Dr Seelig says.

The VeriChip, the size of a grain of rice, can be inserted into patients in the triceps area of the right arm after application of a local anesthetic, the company says. Once there, it cannot be seen. To help seed the market, Applied Digital plans to give away its $650 scanners to hundreds of trauma centers around the country.

Many observers immediately questioned whether there should be a market for the VeriChip. Privacy advocates long had been worried about radio frequency ID (RFID) chips even before they were approved for use in people. It was bothersome enough, they said, that someone with the proper scanner might remotely sense every tagged item one might have in a car trunk or even at home. Worse yet, those same snoops could track a person who was carrying a specific tagged item, such as a book.

It was, therefore, no surprise that the Privacy.org Web site carried this statement about the VeriChip: “The device would not only be accessible to medical professionals, but to anyone with technology capable of reading the information embedded. The device also could be used for nonmedical uses that may include the tracking and monitoring of persons throughout society.” The person with the library book could evade tracking as soon as he left it at home and went out for the day. No one, however, would part from his right arm.

Applied Digital freely acknowledges that the chip can be used to track people. A security application of the chip is the ability to track people in buildings equipped with a network of scanners. It is a considerable leap to imagine entire towns or cities becoming similarly equipped with scanners for tracking, but, as with all issues of civil liberties, the debates often are about the slippery slopes that could lead from the innocuous to the intolerable.

The VeriChip puts physicians yet again at the top of this slope by providing a technology that potentially is both beneficial and problematic.

The author of this monthly column, David Orenstein, is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, e-mail him at davealli@comcast.net.