Beautiful Disaster: October 2008

**Addendum on the bottom**

This is crazy!

Biometric hand scans may help hospital staff obtain personal information in ED, during admissions.
Florida's St. Petersburg Times reported some medical facilities are using biometrics to streamline hospital admittance procedures. For instance, "Tampa Bay's largest hospital group," Baycare, has implemented "the Patient Secure Identity system." Following "a large hospital chain in the Carolinas" that launched the system last year, "registration clerks" at certain Florida facilities use the "little block box," which consists of a "tiny built-in camera" that beams infrared light into the palms of patients' hands. It scans "an image of the veins inside" their palms, "a signature that's supposed to be as unique as a fingerprint." Then, a "computer records it in digital code." The "scanners save time, and are more accurate than names and numbers for collecting patient records." Moreover, they "can cut down on fraud by helping find patients who try to use someone else's name or insurance." Eventually, "hospitals even plan to use the devices to identify unconscious patients who" are admitted into the emergency department (ED).

Addendum:So, I didn't get a chance to comment on this when I posted it.
Cool idea huh! Theoretically this sounds awesome... but what happens to the guy whose hands got crushed in a motorvehicle accident or the guy who got caught in a conveyor belt? Huh?! What about them?!

I can see it now...
Setting: Trauma Bay at the University of Utah. Patient's blood pressure is crashing. He's not breathing. The beeping of the life monitors can hardly be heard over the doctor's orders. ER nurses are frantically grabbing vasopressors and trying to place an IV while the respiratory therapists are intubating him:

AirMed Technician: "Pt is a 43 year old white male found 20 feet from his vehicle on a road in vernal. Patient is unconcious and unarousable. Lacerations cover his entire body and head and 70% of his body is covered in road rash. We have nothing on this guy's history."
Doctor: "Nothing? He's perfectly healthy?"
AirMed:" No, I mean we don't know who this guy is. We can't pull him up in the database."
Doctor: "Did you do the scanny thingy?"
AirMed: "Of course I did the scanny thingy...but nothing came up. He wouldn't scan."
Doctor: "Oh gosh, Let me try it...What the...! His hands! What the heck did that?"
AirMed: "When we arrived at the scene, we saw 2 badgers gnawing at his hands."
Doctor: **silence**
AirMed: "...let me try scanning his hands again..."
Doctor: "No, no...nevermind that! Can't you pull him up by his social?"
AirMed: "No Doc. We got rid of that system back in 2009."
Doctor: "They didn't make a backup system?"
Airmed: "No way! That would be a huge project! Besides, how could we have ever forseen that this would happen to anyone?"

In all honesty- this is way cool!