Next meeting for the Smart Card project, Vienna, 25-27 January 2010
The next meeting for the Smart Card project shall be held on 25-27 Jan. 2010 in Vienna. The philosophy for the project continues to receive great degree of attention and some actions have started to become apparent. For example a news item in Washington Post dated 6th October 2009 stated that since August, patients who undergo CT scans at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center have gotten a little something extra: a record of the amount of radiation they were exposed to during the test.
The NIH center joins a small number of hospitals and outpatient imaging centers across the United States that automatically transmit radiation data to a patient's record whenever certain scans are done. Beginning next year, at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, all scans performed at the hospital and those done in the past 22 years will be in a patient's record. Each time a new scan is ordered, the file will spit out the number of past tests and the estimated risk of cancer for the patient.
The smart card project earlier received CNN attention.
The purpose of the above meeting is to move further in deliberating the actions on what can be done with the help of technology and also with existing technology, to cover both the developing and developed countries. This may require setting up methodologies separately for developed and developing countries, identifying stake holders and developing a work plan for different groups. The contemplated groups are a) dosimetric quantities for diagnostic and interventional procedures, b) interface of imaging equipment with picture achieving and communication for dose data transmission and c) e-health issues to incorporate dose information in e-health records.