PositiveID's Implantable Microchip & Electronic Health Records

Australia's e-Health Bill Paves the Way for PositiveID Human Implantable RFID Microchips

April 13, 2010

OpEdNews - For many this would seem to be the perfect solution to holiday accidents and prevent any unnecessary delays when facing treatment from an uncommon doctor who would require any past medical records. If a doctor in a different state previously treated you, they would need to determine if any further treatments/medications could cause adverse reactions to a prescription you or your family might currently be on. Having access to your usual doctors detailed medical reports, anywhere in the country, might just be a life saver. But is there more to it than meets the eye?

There is indeed a surreptitious plan to set up the ground work for this system to progress seamlessly to implantable RFID microchips. All that would be required is a simple distribution of the PositiveID microchip and the necessary RFID scanners into the medical infrastructure the software side would already be functioning at full steam.

“The Australian healthcare sector is a complex of public and private interests, hospital and community facilities, GP’s, laboratories, health funds, professional associations, special interest groups and individual consumers.”

The introduction of this system would aim to revolutionize the way medical records are accessed and updated, ensuring every time it is accessed by a medical professional, the information is up to date and accurate. Privacy advocates have lambasted the proposed bill quoting medical record privacy breaches, in 2007-2008 there were 234 serious accounts of this occurring yet 160 of these resulted in an emailed warning or counseling. If the unique patient identification number was to go ahead, Australian Privacy Foundation chair Roger Clarke said

“The situation will be many hundreds of times worse, as the HI database will ultimately be accessed by more than 600,000 medical providers and organizations.”

Knowing of the obvious security flaws that are inherent with a system of this scale, why does the Rudd government choose to bulldoze it into legislation? Could this in fact be the Hegelian dialectic at work? It could very well be a future road map that would lead to the more ’secure’ method of accessing medical records via RFID implants as scores of complaints flood the media regarding security breaches and invasions of ‘privacy’. Scott R. Silverman, chairman and CEO of PositiveID claims

“In addition to helping consumers protect themselves from identity theft as it pertains to credit fraud, we are also focused on combating the growing problem of medical identity theft, which affects 7 percent of identity theft victims.”

How noble of Scott.

Lets move to the hardware side of things, as we already have established that Medicare is providing the 16 digit number. Why 16-digits? Introducing the PositiveID implantable RFID microchip. The microchip itself contains only a 16-digit number that when scanned with a hand held reader, connects to a secure online database. The database houses the patient’s identification information and personal health record data. The Council of Australian Governments even state themselves that:

“The identifiers are an important building block for the future introduction of a patient-controlled Individual Electronic Health Record.” Scott R. Silverman states, on behalf of PositiveID, “we put consumers in charge of their own health information through a robust, patient-controlled interface.”

Interesting indeed. It has been established already that IBM has seed-funded PositiveID since inception, would it come as any surprise to you that Medicare relies on IBM for its technology infrastructure and has just paid $189 million for a one-year extension on a services contract? Of course not. This is the most disturbing element, the very people designing and maintaining the system currently in use in Australia, are also the ones behind the PositiveID RFID microchip for humans.

Currently Microsoft and Google both have an e-health record management service. Microsoft’s product is ‘MS HealthVault’, Google’s is simply ‘Google Health’. Both of these services are fully interoperable with PositiveID’s RFID microchip. Microsoft has already made a submission to the national health and hospitals reform commission (NHHRC) and proposed an electronic health record system for the improvement of Australia’s healthcare. Google isn’t far behind in the race either, with CEO Eric Schmidt stating that he “hopes to deliver Google Health to Australia by the end of the year.”

Staying true to the science of gradualism, we are having an information cage slowly erected around us, and we won’t know until it is too late to do anything about it. Maybe the implantable RFID microchips are coming sooner rather than later, we do know that they will be introduced for the purpose of cost efficiency and ‘reliability’ of patient identification, perhaps a failed e-health system could provide the perfect chaos to accommodate an implantable RFID solution. What we won't be told is that it will simply be a ‘plug in’ upgrade to our existing infrastructure; meaning a rapid deployment nation wide. To some money minded bureaucratic sell outs, this is an extremely easy system to sell to an uneducated public.

Australians have already researched the ‘benefits’ of implantable microchips in a published article titled “Lend me your arms: the use and implications of humancentric RFID.” The article suggests that social and ethical concerns “plague the technology,” yet goes on to imply that “Initial adoption of the invasive technology has met with some success but any real assessment of the industry is prejudiced by the commercial monopoly of the VeriChip Corporation [now known as PositiveID]“. “Security and convenience are generic wants” and “Care-related humancentric RFID devices provide unparalleled portability for medical records.” To all the disbelievers that think the human microchipping agenda is light years away, think again; this article was published in 2006.

I’m going to be keeping my eye on the Rudd governments new health plan, in particular the $436 million dollars that has been proposed to deal with the rising number of diabetics just how much of this money is going to be used for a feasibility analysis of PositiveID’s iGlucose system?

“The iGlucose system is a standalone, self-contained unit that will automatically query a diabetic’s data-capable glucometer for blood glucose data and send that data via encrypted SMS text messaging to an online database.”

The machine is well oiled and vigilance is needed, we are dealing with a company that has no qualms when it comes to microchipping Alzheimer patients with cancer causing RFID microchips. There is going to be a huge, vulnerable market in the form of diabetic patients and with the US government and now the Australian government both trying to tackle the expanding financial burden that this disease places on both respective economies. You don’t have to look too far for an ‘easy’ and ‘cost effective’ solution, especially with PositiveID ready to jump at any opportunity it can to ‘help.’

NOTE: Legislation has been presented to Senators within Australia to prevent the mandatory implantation of humans, and it is sitting on their desks currently awaiting further action. Please contact your representatives and encourage them to introduce this into the senate and have it passed into law. For more information on the legislation itself there is a website found at http://www.wethepeoplewillnotbechipped.com/action/ that explains the process you will need to follow including a letter template and fact sheet.

Your Medical Records: Soon to be Held for Ransom by a Chip-Implant Maker

April 13, 2010

BNET - PositiveID (PSID), the microchip implant company formerly known as VeriChip, has added a new wrinkle to its business model that is bound to be controversial: Its Health Link electronic medical record service* is being sold “on a paid subscription basis” in a pilot scheme targeted at ship, dock and maritime workers.

Health Link provides access to a patient’s online medical records. It can be used with an implanted microchip and linked to Microsoft (MSFT)’s HealthVault and Google (GOOG) Health.

The company’s press release is slim on details, but it suggests that either ship workers’ employers or the employees themselves will be charged a monthly fee to keep the service activated. In effect, PositiveID will hold workers’ online health records to ransom: One assumes that if the monthly fee is not paid, access will not be granted. (Why else would anyone feel obligated to pay?) The company said:

Upon successful completion and review of the pilot program, PositiveID will offer its Health Link PHR to millions of seafarers and port workers per year, on a paid subscription basis.

Shipworkers are being targeted because they frequently travel far from their regular doctors:

When sailors become ill, they will visit a doctor at their next port of call. The doctor, typically, does not have access to the sailors’ [pre-employment medical examinations], nor does the doctor know the patient’s medical history, and will therefore conduct a thorough, costly examination prior to prescribing treatment. This expensive and burdensome repetition of medical procedures can be eliminated by using Health Link, which stores the sailors initial PEME and subsequent medical procedures.

You can easily imagine how some companies, eager to save money on healthcare, will insist on Health Link-linked chips for all their employees. If those savings became significant, other companies outside the shipping sector could follow suit… and you can fill in your own Orwellian nightmare from this point. Needless to say, most people will not want to be charged a monthly fee for occasional access to their own records, even if they could be persuaded to walk around with a microchip under their skin.

And there’s a gaping hole in PositiveID’s plan. It would make a lot more sense for shipping companies to upload their workers’ pre-employment medical examinations to their own Web sites. Doctors anywhere in the world could access them with a password, perhaps the employees’ unique coverage plan number. That would achieve the identical savings proposed by PositiveID but without the added cost of monthly subscriptions.

* This item has been corrected to make it clear that PositiveID denies its Health Link service includes microchipping employees. While the two products were once offered together, the company no longer markets them that way, PositiveID says.