WASHINGTON — Emergency health alerts for the Facebook generation? The nation’s ambulance crews are pushing a virtual medical-ID system to rapidly learn a patient’s health history during a crisis — and that can immediately text- message loved ones that the person is headed for a hospital.
The Web-based registry, , started in Oklahoma and got a boost in the fall when the state’s government made the program an optional health benefit for its employees. Now the iBracelet attempts to go nationwide as the American Ambulance Association next month begins training its medics, who in turn will urge people in their communities to sign up.
For $5 a year, basic health information and up to 10 emergency contacts are stored under a computer-assigned Personal Identification Number that’s kept on a wallet card, a key fob or a sticker on an insurance card. It’s a complement to the medical-alert jewelry that people with diabetes, asthma and a host of other conditions have used for decades to signal their needs in an emergency.
And it comes as the American College of Emergency Physicians is trying to determine just what information is the most critical for medics and ER doctors to find when you’re too ill or injured to answer questions, so that competing emergency-alert technologies don’t miss any of the essentials.
