IAEA's Smart Card project
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IAEA launches Smart Card project to develop methodology to track radiation exposure to patients |
Monitoring of radiation doses to staff working within a radiation environment has been a standard practice in large part of the world for many decades. This has substantially helped to reduce and optimize radiation exposure of staff (occupational radiation protection). Although medical exposure of patients constitutes over 95% of exposure of the world population from non-natural radiation sources, there is no internationally agreed methodology to track and keep record of the long-term exposure of the individual patient. One of the main reasons for this is that no dose limits exist for patients, unlike the dose limits prescribed for staff. The right of the patient to information about his/her radiation exposure is becoming increasingly important. In the absence of such methodology, there is a dark area about long-term radiation effects in children undergoing high dose interventional procedures.
There has been some activity in developing a medical smart card for medical records of the patient, and it is planned to extend this concept to radiation exposure of the patient in diagnostic and interventional procedures. Also there are significant developments in e-health that facilitate transportable health records. The smart card project will utilize these e-health resources as the vehicle for adding radiation dose information.
- Information for
- Health Professionals
- Member States
- Patients