Healthcare

Supporting emergency-contact workflows when a patient cannot communicate.

MEC is being developed to provide a complementary pathway for authorized healthcare personnel when conventional emergency-contact information is unavailable, outdated, or difficult to retrieve.

A narrow, practical starting point

For healthcare pilots, MEC is intentionally focused on emergency-contact identification and notification rather than broad clinical data exchange.

  • Patient cannot reliably provide emergency-contact information.
  • Authorized hospital staff identifies an MEC credential or ID.
  • The requester is authenticated.
  • The designated emergency-contact workflow is initiated.
  • Access and notification activity is documented.

Initial healthcare pilot principles

No major EHR integration required. The first pilot can operate through a secure browser-based workflow.

Small participant population. A limited, consenting group allows the process to be measured before scaling.

Controlled simulations. Pilot evaluation does not depend on a real emergency occurring during the test period.

Pilot measurements

Time to identify

How long does it take to identify the appropriate emergency contact?

Time to initiate

How long until the first contact attempt begins?

Staff effort

How many steps and how much staff time does the workflow require?

Successful contact

Was an authorized emergency contact successfully reached or acknowledged?

Research-informed, not assumption-driven. Historical research from Emory's Department of Emergency Medicine examined the time-dependent challenge of next-of-kin availability in major trauma patients. MEC uses that research as context for a modern operational question, not as evidence of any health system's current performance.

Reference: Wright DW, Lancaster RT, Ratcliff JJ, Lowery DW, Wald MM. Proxy identification: a time-dependent analysis. Academic Emergency Medicine. 2004;11(2):204-207.