Make Medical Records useful, by making them record

[Cheimon]

Okay, so currently this is a console that detectives and various medbay people have access to. It's essentially a database of forensics information and a basic profile: fingerprints, blood, age, sex, that sort of stuff. I've never known anybody (except the detective, to get blood matches) to use this stuff. But I think it could fill an exceptionally helpful role.

There are three things it could do really well: record suit sensors, cloning, and recording 'official' surgeries. Let's go into a bit more detail.

Suit sensors are already widely available to doctors and interested personnel because MediVends give out 'handheld crew monitors'. These give out the entire data for all the suit sensors on anyone. A medical records console could show you the current suit sensor status of any particular person, and (here's the interesting part), if that's unavailable the last status that was on it. So, for example if someone commits suicide and then gets made into burgers by the chef, it will say 'suit sensor data unavailable: last showing Joe Antag, 0/0/0/200, Kitchen X,Y'. If this is too powerful, perhaps a good compromise would be a scan every 5 minutes, so you could see that 5 minutes before they lost their suit sensors Joe Antag was dead in maintenance.

Or, at the very least, dead. If medical records could give you a clear indication of whether someone was alive or dead that would be fantastic, because at the moment they're sorely lacking in that department. And it's not as though people aren't linked up to give that information anyway: it's just that the console with the permanent records in it for some reason doesn't record this stuff. It's good to know if someone dies, even if they're later stripped (for what could easily be entirely legitimate reasons).

Second, cloning! Every time you clone someone, you scan them. The person is (typically) identified, and (assuming their soul's in their body) you get a little button with their medical record. This is how the process already works. I'm proposing you make it so the medical record actually records this. It makes a note when a person is scanned that goes in their file, and it makes a note if someone hits the 'clone' button. We don't have any rules about people not knowing they're clones, we have it all linked to the system already, all that needs to happen is some recording. Simple, and potentially very useful.

Third, official surgeries. Maybe this is going a bit too far? I don't know, but I'd love to see Medical Records being helpful. The key that I'm thinking of here is actually borging. When a person goes on an official operating table, linked up to the surgery console (these already exist, as I'm sure you know), that table/console should scan for an ID. If it finds one, and if that person stays on the table (let's assume the table guesses that by weight, that makes sense), then the console records any surgeries started. A bit like with cloning, it doesn't necessarily show if the result was successful, but it gives you an idea. That record of the surgery made goes onto the individual's permanent medical record, if possible, and this allows us to find out more about the person. Did they get borged? That's the big question it answers. But there's also other potentially useful things: they might have had implants removed or an identity change (it wouldn't record the new name, though), they might have had an augmentation or xenomorph removal. This is all stuff that it'd be good to have on medical records. And if you don't want that happening, you can switch the surgery console off or just do the operation on a different table.

TL;DR

Medical Records should actually contain records of what happens in a station round. They should automatically record some form of suit sensor activity (probably just 'alive' or 'dead') until that disappeared, they should automatically record when someone is scanned for cloning, they should automatically record when someone is cloned, and they should automatically record when someone starts a surgery on an operating table next to a surgery console.

[Saegrimr]

Not bad ideas at all.
People already hawk the crew monitor console to see people taking damage, so I doubt the slower medical records would be much different than what we already have.