Medical Information Apps - ICEcare

Given a recent trip to the ER, it made me start to think about what kind of information I should have with me in the event of an accident. There are so many things which could have you making a trip to the Urgent Care or Emergency Room where they start asking you questions which you probably will not be able to answer accurately. A recent commercial on televisions has a series of people being asked the question of what they might be allergic to with some pretty funny answers. But when it comes to interactions with potential drugs, it is not a laughing matter. So, you need to be able to provide information to the doctor or nurse related to a number of things. And there are a number of In Case of Emergency apps out there with the ICE label associated with them. So you are going to have to take a look at them and determine what is the minimum that you must have to communicate your health history to a doctor. Here are a few that you should be considering:

• What medications are you currently taking?


• What allergies to you have?


• What medications are you allergic to?


• What other conditions do you have?

And these are just a few of the things that you should be able to relate to the doctor, especially if you are out of town and your doctor is not available. So, the best place to have this is on your smart phone since you always have it with you. Finding medical information apps that will fit your needs exactly is not always easy and there are differences where some are free and others will cost you. One that I found for Android is the ICEcare mobile app which looks like it will fit the needs that I have. It is not a perfect fit and to get that, I would have to create my own. Obviously, there is a certain amount of information which one has to fill in to make it of value and I will be doing that over the next several weeks.

The key will be using it to keep things up to date which will take a few doctor visits over time to see how easy it appears to maintain the information. The ICEcare app maintains the information on your mobile device and on the web, so if you are concerned about your information being on a web site, this is probably not one for you to be using. One of the important things about having your medical history in one place is when applying for insurance. On the insurance application, they want you to list all your surgeries, your history, family history and a number of other things which we normally do not keep track of. With the medical information apps, you have a single location to track all the critical information.

One interesting note about ICECare. In looking at this over several days, I tried to access my information via the web site and forgot my password. So, I clicked on the forgot password link and filled in the email address and verification code expecting to see an email with the password in a few minutes. Seems like they may have some issues with the forgot password process as I am still waiting. Not a problem as I can create a new account by reinstalling the software. If this was a situation where you had to get in to make changes, you would have a problem.

I hope to report back my findings on this one in a few months of working with it to see how it fits. I may try and have John look at another medical information app over the next few months as well so that we can compare the two to see how they worked out. In the mean time, I have to continue to enter my information.