BBC medical records story

[Nick Barnes]

At 2002-03-05 21:49:03+0000, "Peter Tomlinson" writes:
> "David Hansen" <davidh@spidacom.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Any estimates on how many lines of medical record a "smart" card can
> > hold? Probably zero, especially with photographs.
> 
> Recent developments in the far east are producing single chip smart cards
> with 1Mbyte of flash memory. These are intended for citizen ID use, with
> good quality photos stored in them - 10K bytes allows a very good mug shot
> to be stored, or an Xray picture

You're joking, right?  Compressed digital storage of radiographs
starts at around 1-2 megabytes per picture (depends on the picture).
That's lossless.  Uncompressed is typically 5-10 megabytes per
picture.  Last time I read up on this there were no lossy compression
algorithms considered suitable for X-rays.  The digitizing procedure
includes hand-checking by a clinician, to check that the "specific
medical content of interest is perceptible in the digital images".

> so there is plenty more space for text records - and an A4 page of
> text takes 5K to 10K bytes.

Except that almost all of it is handwritten.  I don't think there's a
viable alternative to scanning the whole lot, at quite high quality.
Images are the thing: radiographs, photographs, micrographs, etc.

Some important subset of my medical records might fit on a smart card,
but I know people whose records wouldn't fit on a CD-ROM.

Nick B