NU #1 MBAH by Sugar Scalpel

Smart Card for Patients When They Enter Hospitals

Pseudonym: Sugar Scalpel

A patient is called a patient I guess because he/she is patient enough to wait for the doctor or his/her turn to be called to be examined for his/her medical condition. If you have been a patient yourself, you should have already experienced being asked for your personal information like name, age, sex, date of birth, address, profession, religion, who to notify in case of emergency, mode of payment(cash or HMO), Philhealth accreditation, history of previous illnesses and doctor visits, etc., etc., over and over again everytime you visit a clinic or hospital while in deep pain and/or not feeling well. Frustrating? Irritating? Sounds all too familiar. But there are now ways on how to make the situation better and a more pleasant experience for our beloved patients. In some of the private hospitals we have visited, they have existing credit card type cards with their name on it and hospital number for easy retrieval of their personal information but they will still ask you several more questions for verification. But what we are embarking on is to be able to incorporate a smart chip into their credit card type patient cards, just like some of the newer bank credit cards, to be able to incorporate more data to include not only a patient's personal information but also their medical history, the names of the doctors they have visited, their allergies, their current medications, etc., so that when they enter a clinic or hospital, they will just present their "smart card" with all the needed information and this will be scanned by a computer scanner or bar-code reader and presto, the healthcare provider will be completely and comprehensively informed of a patient's medical condition in a few seconds and can concentrate on providing treatment to the present medical problem of a patient without irritating the patient with too many questions and causing them inconvenience when they are already experiencing a painful or difficult medical condition. This system is easy to set-up due to the already existing technology like the small smart chips they incorporate in credit cards, the bar-code reader you are all too familiar with in supermarkets and of course the computer or tablets or smartphones that are popular nowadays because of their portability which will be very applicable and convenient also for the healthcare provider when they use this system.     4