I take a lot of medications and, of course, they’re all listed on my ResQFlash Trio along with the name of the prescribing Dr. and his/her phone number. This provides me with excellent protection in that situation which is the original and primary mission of ResQFlash……to tell an attending physician what he/she needs to know about my health status when, due to unconsciousness or shock, I am unable to do so.

In my family, my ResQFlash plays a much broader role. The data on the drive has been copied onto my desktop computer, my wife’s laptop, and my daughter’s desktop. This operation took about 2 minutes per computer. This simple, no cost, effort brings many benefits…..some potentially quite crucial others just greatly convenient………………

If my wife is out of town and I become seriously ill, my daughter is well equipped to deal with the situation, contact my doctors, administer my medication, etc.

If I’m going to the Dr’s office for a routine visit I can print out my record to present to the technician when she asks the inevitable “What medications are you currently taking?” In fact on a recent visit to a new Dr, when the technician saw the ResQFlash printout she said “That’s really great—I wish we were computerized so that we could just plug this in. I’m going to show this to the Dr.!”

In the unlikely event that the data on your ResQFlash became corrupted somehow, you could erase the data and recopy it from your computer…..a backup which might take as long as 2-3 minutes to accomplish.. Of course, you have several other ways to deal with this very unlikely problem…..copy from another member of your Trio, or call USB Life Links………..

We have found that sharing this information in a readily available manner has generally opened up the subject of family health care in a very good way………..my daughter’s almost immediate comment was that she felt so much more confident knowing what she could/would do in a situation if it was dropped on her shoulders. This leads to a more “global” thought. Faced with the uncertainties of the future of healthcare and of healthcare records, it behooves us all to become much more specifically aware of many of the details of our own healthcare issues…….definition and status of conditions we may have, prescription drugs we are taking, etc. Given the magnitude of the process of changing over to centralized electronic records, it is not beyond the pale of possibility that some records may get lost in the shuffle. This emphasizes the need for the individual to personally possess records of at least the most important aspects of his/her health picture.