However I do not know how many times this would be useful at all? How often are relatives known, but contact information is unknown? In the developed world at least, because I do not think this system would be of much use elsewhere. And if the patient opts into it, then the patient could also simply hand a phone number or three.
It would also be really expensive, wouldn’t it? I don’t see a huge market for it, so performing the service for a dollar doesn’t sound good. I’m not sure if a patient would be okay with spending several hundred on both the service and someone to handle the phone calls. You could use a robot to handle that.
Still, I think a patient could just leave a phone number if they decide to opt in anyway. But it’s a nice and helpful idea!
The easiest I found is to write in info on an image & set it up as my lock screen wallpaper.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207021
https://www.imore.com/how-add-emergency-contacts-iphone-appl...
(An unfortunate acronym in these times, but it's a term some subset of the population recognizes.)
What if the patient didn't want their family to be reached?
What if the patient has been trying to escape an abusive family and you're leading them straight back to the patient!
I always wonder when my local police force Tweets 'missing person' and I think 'what the fuck if they were trying to escape an abusive partner!!'. Or what if they just don't want to be found by anyone for some reason that's none of your business.
I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.
Abruptly disappearing is a behavioral pattern more common among the mentally ill than abuse victims, in which case alerting family is probably the most ethical thing one could possibly do. (If anything, the family themselves might not want to be contacted-- "oh, god, him again?")
> I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.
Everyone is someone's child, or parent. For the sake of a minority of lone wolves who just want to be left alone, why expect the rest of society to die alone in their hospital beds? Not everybody can even give consent, or are mentally sound enough to to do.
The most human thing we can do is to try to connect patients with their families, even if it goes wrong a small fraction of the time.
How would you handle it? Say you are in a park and you see somebody drop from an apparent heart attack. Do you start CPR or do you stand there wondering if maybe they have a do-not-resuscitate order on file somewhere?
This makes me wonder if the mobile carriers and phone OS manufacturers could collaborate on a similar type of targeted system. Let's assume that an accredited healthcare provider has an emergent patient. The patient has been identified, and a name of a friend/relative/etc. has been provided, but no contact information is available[0].
In a situation like this, the healthcare provider would provide to the mobile carriers & OS manufacturers the patient's name, the relative's name (with an indicator if spelling is correct or guessed), and the provider's contact info. The carriers/manufacturers could then check their user/subscriber lists for anyone with either a matching or a similar (using something like SOUNDEX) name, building a list of candidate recipients.
The candidate recipients would be notified via a free SMS, push message, or similar. The patient would give explicit permission for this action to be performed, knowing that a limited number of random people would get notified. Finally—and importantly—the provider (and the patient) would not get any information on who (if anyone) was notified. Each candidate recipient would get a unique verification code, which they would provide if they chose to call in. That would reveal the name and contact info of the recipient who is calling in. It may also help prevent multiple unrelated people from calling in (by detecting code reuse).