HIPAA Blog

[ Friday, July 30, 2004 ]

 

More than an ID bracelet:  Almost the whole Drummond clan took a Gulf beach vacation on the Alabama-Florida border back in June.  That included all of my siblings but one brother; my parents passed away young many years ago, my mother of breast cancer and my father of complications from diabetes.  My father was an insulin-dependent diabetic from the time he was 28 years old, and wore at times both a MedicAlert bracelet and a necklace pendant notifying any potential caregivers or EMS responders of his diabetic condition.

My sister Leanne, who works for a pharmaceutical testing company just outside London, was able to attend because she was going to be stateside for a medical conference anyway.  She arrived from the conference with lots of gifts: what she called "tat," it included canvas bags, coolers, caps, pens, notepads, and other tchatchkas that various vendors handed out to conference attendees.  One of the coolest things I got was a memory stick (branded by CMM Global - thanks, guys!), which will hold 64M of memory.  It's about 3 inches long, an inch wide and half an inch thick, weighs a couple of ounces max, and looks like a mini-highlighter.  It could be attached to a keychain or clipped to your pocket, and you can store up to 64 meg of digital information on it.  That should be enough space to hold all of the HIPAA regulations, plus commentary.  You could carry notebooks of information in your pocket and only take up the space of a pack of gum (and we're talking the 5-stick Juicy Fruit pack size).

I haven't loaded the driver on my computer (my tech guys don't like me messing with my computer any more than I already do), so I haven't used it, but I continue to marvel at it.  I've got a stack of 1.44 meg floppy disks on my desk, holding my HIPAA presentations, and think about the possibility of putting all of them in this memory stick.  It's pretty amazing.

Why do I bring these things up?  There's an article in yesterday's NY Times about using memory sticks like this to hold all of your medical records.  You could carry your records with you, and the memory stick would be just like a MedicAlert bracelet, only much more so.

Ain't technology cool?

Jeff [11:38 AM]

Comments: Post a Comment
http://www.blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=3380636 Blogger: HIPAA Blog - Edit your Template