Set up your phone to share your medical info in an emergency

It's uncomfortable to try and picture yourself in a position where your life may not be in your own hands. You faint in a grocery store, you come off your bike on a summer trail, or you are in a car accident. If you are lucky, there could be a bystander nearby to help. They pick up your phone to call someone… and it is locked.

Your phone has a built-in card for exactly this moment. It holds your name, your allergies, the medicines you take, your blood type, and the people who should get a call. The whole point of it is that anyone can read it without your passcode and without unlocking a thing. By the time you finish this, yours will be filled in, and you will have watched it work.

Think of it as a note taped to the inside of your front door, the one a neighbor would read if they had to let the paramedics in. You write it once and then it sits there doing nothing until the day someone might need it.

On an iPhone

1. Open the Health app, the white one with the red heart.
2. Tap your photo in the top right corner, then tap Medical ID, then tap Edit.
3. Fill in what a paramedic would want to know first: allergies, conditions, medicines, blood type.
4. Scroll down and add an emergency contact or two from your address book.

Then do the one thing most people skip. Turn on Show When Locked. Without it, you have written a note that stays in a locked drawer. While you are in there, turn on Share During Emergency Call too, so your details go out on their own if you dial 911.

On an Android phone

The wording shifts a little by brand.

1. Open Settings and tap Safety and emergency.
2. Tap Medical info and fill it in, then tap Emergency contacts and add your people.

On a Google Pixel, this lives in a separate app called Personal Safety, under Your info. The toggle that matters here is Show on Lock screen (on a Pixel it reads "Allow access to emergency info"). One Pixel quirk worth knowing: the phone needs a working SIM or eSIM to text an emergency contact for you later, so make sure that side is set up.

The most important step

That lock screen toggle is what makes this information useful. Plenty of people fill in every field, feel done, and never flip the switch to display the information. This leaves the card invisible at the one moment it is needed most. Filling it in once is not a guarantee it still works. Phones rearrange these screens with big updates, and a contact can drop off a list without you noticing.

So check it yourself, right now, before you close this tab.

1. Lock your phone.
2. Wake it and swipe up to the passcode screen as if you were about to type your code.
3. On an iPhone, tap Emergency, then Medical ID. On Android, tap Emergency call, then View emergency info.

If your name and your details show up while the phone is still locked, you are finished.

We covered who gets your photos and accounts after you are gone a couple of weeks back. This is the other side of the same coin: the small bit of setup that helps the people around you while you are still here.

If you set this up this week for an older parent, or for a kid heading off on their own, I would like to hear how it went.