Brave new medical MICROCHIP

microchip the size of a long grain of rice encased in a tiny glass capsule and injected into the upper right arm could, in an emergency, save a person’s life.

The device, called VeriMed by its manufacturer, contains a series of 16 numbers — a code — that when read by a hand-held scanner can reveal key computerized medical information to properly registered people. The device is meant to help with treatment and prevent giving needless or possibly harmful medication to patients unable to talk to health care workers about their medical history and condition.

Admirers see it as a technological convenience no different from bar codes in supermarkets or the electronic EZ-Pass in one’s car. Detractors say it has dangerous implications for civil liberties.

The problem is getting enough scanners and trained personnel in hospitals while simultaneously persuading enough people to be implanted with the chip, which is known as a passive radio frequency identification device, or RFID. The cost of an implant is between $150 and $400, and insurance does not yet cover the procedure.

“It’s a three-prong approach, and all three [doctors, hospitals and patients] have to come together,” explains Dr. Jonathan Musher, a Bethesda physician. He works for the manufacturer, VeriChip Corp. of Delray Beach, Fla., a subsidiary of Applied Digital, building what he calls “the network” required to make the chips effective. He says he was convinced of the device’s merit before he joined the company and always has mixed his clinical practice — geriatrics and adult medicine — with what he calls “an administrative component.”

Dr. Musher has about 260 doctors in his network and has implanted about 30 chips to date, mostly in elderly people who he says are those most likely to need the device — especially the senior population in assisted-living facilities and anyone suffering from mild dementia. About 2,200 patients have been implanted worldwide since the chip was introduced in 2004, he says.

“If someone presents to an emergency room who is comatose, he gets scanned, and important information comes up,” Dr. Musher says, giving one example of how the chip would function to save time and avert mistakes. An authorized person would put in his own identifying number and, with a password, be able in five to 10 seconds to learn a patient’s name and pertinent medical history.

“Let’s say, worst case, someone can do that who is not authorized and they come up with a name, certain allergies, diagnoses and the fact [the patient is] on three or four medicines and has an advanced directive not to [take extreme measures] to resuscitate. I say, ‘So what?’ Everything in life is a risk-benefit. That is low risk versus the benefit.”

Dr. Musher equates the procedure to getting an injection halfway between the right arm’s shoulder and elbow, with a local anesthetic used to numb the site. “The body physiologically forms a cocoon around it,” he says, adding that “the chip is not visible as it might be in the shin.

New medical data is added and old data changed by using a special password in the computer program that stores the information.

“It appealed to me immediately,” says Roxanne Fischer, a biologist with a local government health agency whose 83-year-old mother has Alzheimer’s disease. “I would love to see more people take advantage of this. Certainly anyone with pets thinks it is an incredible idea. I’d definitely get one myself. There is a lot to be said [for having] a means of identification on your body so you don’t have to be carrying something.”

Worry about identity theft doesn’t bother her.

“Just the opposite,” she says. “It is a passive chip and doesn’t emit energy and can’t be tracked.”

Nevertheless, she says she might have been more skeptical if she had not known Dr. Musher as a physician caring for her mother. She cites troubles with her mother, who, when living alone in Florida, once was lost for two days after eluding a caregiver.

Daniel Hickey, 77, a naval commander living in a military retirement home, agrees. He has had the chip implanted although he is of sound mind and in relatively good health in spite of having had high blood pressure for most of his life.

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