Emergency Contact Information

This is one of those topics that nobody wants to think about until it’s too late: Emergencies. What happens if you’re traveling and something happens? In fact, what happens if you’re on your way to work in your own home town and something happens? Not all emergencies will wait until you’re safely out of the country. Do you have all of your medical information readily available? What about your emergency contact information? Sure, you may have it all safely stored in your head, but what if you’re unconscious? Who’s going to tell the paramedics that you’re allergic to penicillin?

I generally carry a money clip; it’s slim, holds my driver’s license, one business card, a credit card, and some cash. That’s not a lot, but it covers 99% of my needs. But it also doesn’t leave a lot of room for extra documents. I have a photo of my medical insurance card in my phone, which has come in handy when I got a flu shot the other day (no copay!), but my phone has a passcode. If I were to get into an accident, the paramedics would have limited information to use, some of which could help them with my treatment. So I came up with a plan:

1. Get printer-friendly business cards like these
2. Figure out what you want on your card. In my case, I’m going to break it down into two sections. One section will be the basics, in case I lose my wallet. The other will be in case I’m in a medical emergency.
3. Design a card that has everything you need using Microsoft Word or whatever software you like (Word has built-in templates for these things, which makes it easier.)
4. Print your card, stick one in your wallet/ purse, one in your laptop bag, one in your suitcase, wherever you want.
5. Rest easy!

For example, my card would roughly look like this:

If found, please Return To: William Wonka WilliamWonka@gmail.com (555)867-5309 Scan Code For Emergency Information

If you scan that code, it gives you all of the basic information that a medical professional might need, including my blood type, known allergies, medical insurance, and emergency contact information. You can generate your QR code for free at The QR Code Generator. You just need to download the image and save it to your computer and you can use it for whatever you want.

Remember, the more you put into the text of the code, the smaller the blocks will be. After a certain point, they may be too small to print clearly, they may be more likely to smudge, or they may not scan properly. All of these defeat the purpose of the card. So either keep your information short and sweet, or, if you have a website, create a page with all of your information there and make the QR code point to the website. For example, the QR code below points to this page, and it looks like this:

See how much cleaner it looks compared to the one with all of the actual data? And because it’s pointed to a webpage, it can hold a lot more information than embedding the text in the code could. In fact, you could also have a photo of your insurance card on that page, links to your Living Will and Last Will, etc, all on that page. But this will require a little knowledge of how to create a web page, someplace to host your data, and it will require that whoever is scanning your code has an internet connection. It’s likely that they will, but it’s still something to consider.

Some things you may choose to include:

• Full name
• Blood type
• Known drug allergies
• Any current medication
• Medical insurance information
• Emergency contact information
• Citizenship/ passport information

And anything else you think is relevant. You want this to be useful to any medical professional who needs to treat you, but remember that the information would be available to anyone who finds or steals your wallet, so there’s probably a fine line in there between too much info and not enough. You will have to be the judge of that.

If there’s enough interest, I may set up a website where you can upload whatever files you want, it’ll generate your page for you, and give you your personalized QR code. This could be the difference between life or death, so it might be a worthwhile endeavor. Regardless, creating an emergency card like this isn’t a bad idea. It’ll cost you $10 for a pack of the cards and about 15 minutes of your time. And it could save your life. I’m going to do mine now. I just need to make sure I don’t use the code I generated for this article: The last thing I need is a transfusion from an Oompa Loompa.