I am working on a slightly related project as part of my scientific research, so I can relate to the motivation behind Lifesquare, but also share some of the criticism.
* On their website they make it seem like people are motivated to put QR codes everywhere, just in case something bad might happen to them. People usually are not motivated to plan for unlikely, unexpected and bad events in such ways. * Indeed there is no reason to safe the information on a server, since the essential data is small enough to be printed as human-readable text, or at least be captured in a compressed format inside the QR code (so it can be decoded without a central server). * The medications that patients take change, and updating the data is difficult (again, patients are not motivated enough, electronic health record systems are usually a mess, and shielded by harsh legal restrictions).
--- Self-promotion starts below ---
For the research project that I am working on we are focusing on different aspects -- although the general idea of 'using QR codes to save lives' is the same. The thing is called "Medicine Safety Code" (http://safety-code.org) and is done as part of a working group of the W3C. Instead of focusing on representing medication intake (which can change rapidly), we focus on representing data that is constant throughout our lifetime: pharmacogenomic variants. Each of us has some variants in key genes that influence whether a certain medication can help or harm us. If we would know about these variants we could make better, more personalized decisions when we are prescribed new medications – in contrast to the current “let’s try the standard therapy first and see what happens” approach that puts adverse reactions to prescribed medications in the top-10 list of reasons for hospitalisation in developed countries.
The time could be right: targeted genetic testing is becoming very cheap (100 Dollars), and technologies such as QR codes can make it easy to integrate the information into workflows of routine medical care.
Even though these pharmacogenomic data are quite large, they can be compressed to fit into the data captured by the QR code – making it possible to interpret a Medicine Safety Code without a centralized database. Still, the server can come in handy for interpreting Medicine Safety Codes without installing dedicated software first.
Regarding privacy: Indeed, everyone who has the code knows about my pharmacogenes and drug allergies. However, I feel more comfortable by protecting my medical data like I protect all other content of my wallet, rather than handing over my data to some private company that keeps it in a central server together with the data of thousands of others. At least a high-profile ‘leak’ of all data is made impossible that way.
Regarding uptake: Only a handful of patients are motivated enough to take extra expenses for such things, even though they might benefit. To make this work on a significant, global scale, it needs to be backed by institutions and payers. And this will only happen when one can prove that it saves money and decreases hospitalisations. It is difficult, but I hope that it can be done. If deployed on a wide scale, such Medicine Safety Codes could indeed safe lives AND money.
Slashdot Mirror
I am working on a slightly related project as part of my scientific research, so I can relate to the motivation behind Lifesquare, but also share some of the criticism.
* On their website they make it seem like people are motivated to put QR codes everywhere, just in case something bad might happen to them. People usually are not motivated to plan for unlikely, unexpected and bad events in such ways.
* Indeed there is no reason to safe the information on a server, since the essential data is small enough to be printed as human-readable text, or at least be captured in a compressed format inside the QR code (so it can be decoded without a central server).
* The medications that patients take change, and updating the data is difficult (again, patients are not motivated enough, electronic health record systems are usually a mess, and shielded by harsh legal restrictions).
--- Self-promotion starts below ---
For the research project that I am working on we are focusing on different aspects -- although the general idea of 'using QR codes to save lives' is the same. The thing is called "Medicine Safety Code" (http://safety-code.org) and is done as part of a working group of the W3C. Instead of focusing on representing medication intake (which can change rapidly), we focus on representing data that is constant throughout our lifetime: pharmacogenomic variants. Each of us has some variants in key genes that influence whether a certain medication can help or harm us. If we would know about these variants we could make better, more personalized decisions when we are prescribed new medications – in contrast to the current “let’s try the standard therapy first and see what happens” approach that puts adverse reactions to prescribed medications in the top-10 list of reasons for hospitalisation in developed countries.
The time could be right: targeted genetic testing is becoming very cheap (100 Dollars), and technologies such as QR codes can make it easy to integrate the information into workflows of routine medical care.
Even though these pharmacogenomic data are quite large, they can be compressed to fit into the data captured by the QR code – making it possible to interpret a Medicine Safety Code without a centralized database. Still, the server can come in handy for interpreting Medicine Safety Codes without installing dedicated software first.
Regarding privacy: Indeed, everyone who has the code knows about my pharmacogenes and drug allergies. However, I feel more comfortable by protecting my medical data like I protect all other content of my wallet, rather than handing over my data to some private company that keeps it in a central server together with the data of thousands of others. At least a high-profile ‘leak’ of all data is made impossible that way.
Regarding uptake: Only a handful of patients are motivated enough to take extra expenses for such things, even though they might benefit. To make this work on a significant, global scale, it needs to be backed by institutions and payers. And this will only happen when one can prove that it saves money and decreases hospitalisations. It is difficult, but I hope that it can be done. If deployed on a wide scale, such Medicine Safety Codes could indeed safe lives AND money.