As a onetime volunteer ambulance driver and EMT, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have come across this article about using USB drives just as Medic Alert bracelets giving medical information.
Once in charge of a blood pressure clinic regularly taken at the local Sundowners Club for the town’s elderly, I not only pushed the folks into filling out short medical forms of pertinent information and storing them in their home refrigerators in bright colored vials where we were trained to check for them, but had made up a book that was carried in the ambulance at all times containing the blood pressure stats on those of my elderly folks who agreed to allow it. I realized that while I was used to the peculiarities of each of their readings, other medical personal on duty would not be as familiar and might mistake a particularly high reading as a danger sign whereas I knew that it was normal and controlled by medication, or worse, a low pressure reading as normal when it in fact might be a serious sign.
The USB drive can obviously give more detailed information about patient meds, history, doctors, etc. and I can see it as becoming essential on ambulances and in the ERs.
God bless whoever thought of using technology to this end, and I don’t care if he makes a ton of money from the idea.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology