*2 implant chips with the instruments used to implant them. Verichip website

This RFID has not yet replaced anything that is already on the market. However, in the future, if this chip was implanted into everyone, medical centers and hospitals would not need paper files anymore. Everything would be saved in the chips and onto the database. Unfortunately, it could take many decades before this happens. A very interesting article in Time magazine, written by Siobhan Morrissey says: "Pen-and-paper record keeping is 97% of medical records today; 98,000 deaths occurred last year in emergency rooms because of no information or inaccurate information.(United States,October 2007))" .The implant chip could have saved a lot of time and many lives , by having useful information quickly. Furthermore, the RFID implant chip helps to identify victims in disaster recovery efforts. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Gary Hargrove, a Mississippi coroner, used Verichip to identify 300 victims. The chip was injected in the deceased and had many information saved onto it such as height, weight, hair, eyes and clothing. Hargrove said that it helped identifying victims because friends and families described a missing person, and they could look at the database instead of having to look at all bodies.Then, the families could have answers a lot faster than before. Again, in th future, this technology can easily replace pen-and-paper records and can save a lot of time and a lot of worries for many people.

References

Time Magazine: Are microchips safe?

C-NET: RF-IDing the dead

E-Week: Health Care IT : Medical RFID Tagging could save lives