The cards might even store an X-ray of your lungs or the sounds of your heart murmur. Take the smart card with you and hand it to the receptionist, who swipes it through a digital reader and, voila , your medical data appear on a screen. In the tradition-bound health field, with its incompatible medical systems, these moves are coming slowly. But Web-based health data repositories are already in use in some places. In Boston, Caregroup Healthcare System launched PatientSite, where health plan members can read their records, including their doctors' diagnoses and summaries of visits, look up X-ray or medical test results, and add comments and corrections to be entered into their health histories.
Patients can also converse with doctors through a secure electronic messaging connection.
But before this becomes standard practice, major concerns about privacy and confidentiality will have to be assuaged. Currently, the military is far ahead of the civilian sector and, among other things, has devised digital dog tags that contain a soldier's medical data along with identification. If the soldier were wounded, the card could be viewed with a digital reader as soon as he or she reached a battlefield hospital. Dr. Greg Mogel, who until recently managed the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center at Fort Dietrick in Maryland, says there is a shift underway in the use of the Internet. Until recently, he says, people used the Web mainly to get information about diseases and treatments and often would arrive at doctors' offices with stacks of Web printouts about their condition.