Perhaps you saw the news headlines this week about the “Invisible Bracelet.” Lauran Neergaard of Associated Press reports:
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 which can immediately text-message loved ones that the person is headed for a hospital.
The Web-based registry, invisibleBracelet.org, started in Oklahoma and got a boost this fall when the state’s government made the program an optional health benefit for its own employees.
Now the Invisible Bracelet 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.
But not so fast, says Jonathan Warren:
If you wonder how a private firm like Docvia can afford to intake, store, document, disburse, update and protect your medical history, personal emergency contacts, health insurance records and more for only $5. per year, don’t. It doesn’t really happen like that.
InvisibleBracelet.org, or “iB” as the firm likes to call it, appears to have a profit model entirely different than they would have you believe from their very government-looking website. In press releases accommodatingly picked up verbatim by the AP, the Company appears benevolently intervening to assist the American Ambulance Association, among others, with the capability to virtually diagnose your medical problems, call your wife, text your kids and probably take out the trash, all while you are on the way to the hospital, in the capable hands of a paramedic to whom you have granted all this data.
The magic pill to perform this miracle is iB’s online storage of your information, and its provision of documents to carry in your wallet to prove it. All for $5. per year.
Or not.
Warren takes a look at Docvia’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Read more here, particularly if you are thinking of signing up.