When a paramedic arrives at a scene, they need three things about the patient within the first few minutes: what medications the person takes, what they're allergic to, and who to call.
Not their Gmail password. Not their mutual fund folios. Not their will.
Those three things.
And in the scenario where the person they're treating is unconscious, or too confused to speak, or alone in a hospital while family is still en route — those three things can be surprisingly hard to surface. The information exists. The patient knows it. It's just locked inside a phone, behind biometrics the paramedic can't use, or buried in a folder the family member getting the call can't reach from three hundred miles away.
The Emergency Card in SecureKeep is the feature built around that exact gap. It is probably the most-used feature in the app, and the one that generates the most reader email — because people install SecureKeep thinking the point is passwords, and then discover that the emergency card is the thing that actually changes how they think about their phone.
What It Is
An Emergency Card is a single structured page inside your SecureKeep vault that holds:
- Medical information — blood type, allergies, current medications and dosages, existing conditions.
- Emergency contacts — primary, secondary, relationship, phone, alternative phone.
- Physician — name, practice, phone, specialisations you see them for.
- Insurance — health insurance provider, policy number, member ID; optionally, secondary insurance if you carry one.
- Notes — anything else a paramedic or ER nurse would benefit from knowing ("uses hearing aids," "has a pacemaker," "primary language is Marathi," "do-not-resuscitate instructions on file with hospital X").
One page. One vault. One trusted person per vault who can reach it.
Why It Works Differently Than a Typical Medical ID
Apple Health has a Medical ID feature. Google has an Emergency Information setting on Pixel phones. Samsung has its own variant. These features are genuinely useful — a paramedic can swipe up on a locked iPhone and see medical ID information without needing the passcode.
They work, with limits:
- They rely on someone knowing to check them on your specific phone model.
- They are limited to what the OS's Emergency Medical ID fields accept (usually medication, allergies, conditions, a single contact).
- They don't travel. If your phone battery is dead, or you're in a hospital and your phone is in a plastic bag with your clothes, Apple Medical ID is not reachable.
- Your family — not the paramedic — is also an audience. The family calling long-distance to a hospital needs this information too, and they can't swipe up on your locked phone.
The Emergency Card in SecureKeep is designed for both audiences: the paramedic who might swipe up on the lock screen, and the family member three hours away who needs the same information without needing to be next to your physical phone.
Two Things You Can Do With It
1. Export as PDF. One tap. You get a clean, single-page document with the essential information laid out. Store it in your email to yourself. Print a copy for the fridge. Keep one in the glove compartment. Send a copy to the trusted person in your vault. The PDF is plaintext by design — the whole point is that it is readable in an emergency without a master password.
2. Export as image. Same data, rendered as a wallet-sized image. Save it to your photo gallery. Set it as your lock-screen wallpaper if you choose. Tuck it behind the case of your phone. Some users print it, laminate it, and keep it in their wallet — old-school emergency card style.
Both exports are generated from the encrypted vault data. The vault itself remains encrypted. The export is a deliberate, one-at-a-time decryption you choose to make — the reverse of what most of the rest of the app does, and intentionally so.
Why It's Designed This Way
Most encryption debates end at the master password. You lock the vault. Everything inside is safe. Done.
For an emergency card, that logic actively hurts you. The person who most needs the information may be the least able to unlock it — a child holding their unconscious parent's phone, a paramedic with no credentials, a family member watching the situation unfold over a phone call. A vault that requires a password to produce emergency information is, in the emergency, no better than no vault at all.
So the design choice is asymmetric:
- Inside the app: Emergency Card is encrypted, behind master password or biometric, just like everything else. You cannot read it from a stolen phone.
- Exports: are explicit, user-initiated, and produce plaintext artifacts designed to be readable without the app. You choose what to export, when, and where to leave it.
The Emergency Card exports are also the only artifacts we deliberately recommend storing in multiple places — including places as "risky" as your fridge door. The threat model of a burglar photographing your allergy list from your kitchen is far smaller than the threat of a paramedic not knowing you're allergic to penicillin.
Multi-Vault + Emergency Cards
One of the quieter decisions we made early on: every vault in SecureKeep can have its own separate Emergency Card, enforced by a UNIQUE database constraint.
This matters because a SecureKeep user often has more than one vault. A spouse vault. A parent vault. A child vault. Each person you care for has their own world of information — and their own medical reality.
Each vault gets exactly one emergency card. You cannot accidentally create two, and you cannot mix up which medical information belongs to which person. A mother carrying a vault for her elderly father can have his emergency card at her fingertips — distinct from her own, distinct from her husband's, distinct from her daughter's — and hand it over at the ER reception without looking at the wrong one.
Why the Collapsible Sections
The Emergency Card edit screen uses collapsible sections — medical, contacts, insurance, physician, notes — rather than showing everything on one long scroll. Two reasons:
- Most users fill it in partially. You might know your medications and allergies by heart but need to look up your insurance member ID. Collapsing the sections lets you complete what you have, save, and come back.
- The export warning. Right before you export, the app reminds you: this will create a plaintext file readable by anyone who has it. That warning is more visible when the content you're about to export is condensed into discrete sections rather than buried in a wall of text.
The Users Who Keep Emailing Us
A pattern shows up in the feedback we receive: more than any other feature, the Emergency Card generates real-world stories from users.
- A reader whose father carried a printed Emergency Card in his wallet; the card reached the ER twenty minutes before the family did, and the hospital was able to avoid a medication that would have interfered with his heart condition.
- A parent of a child with severe food allergies who prints the card three times a year, laminates it, and puts it in backpacks, overnight bags, and the glovebox.
- An elderly couple who maintain each other's cards in each other's vaults, so either spouse can produce the other's information without needing to unlock the other's phone.
These aren't hypotheticals. They are why we built the feature, and they are why we keep investing in it.
How to Set Yours Up
If you already have SecureKeep installed:
- Open your vault.
- On the dashboard, tap Emergency Card.
- Walk through the four sections. Don't try to complete them all in one sitting — fill in what you know now, save, come back.
- Once you have the essentials (medications, allergies, primary contact), tap Export as PDF or Export as Image.
- Save the export somewhere your trusted person can reach independently — an email you send to yourself and copy them on, a printout on the fridge, a file in shared cloud storage that predates SecureKeep.
Ten minutes. One artifact. The most likely scenario in which someone will ever use your SecureKeep vault is this one — and this feature is the one that will do the work.
One Feature, Quietly Load-Bearing
SecureKeep has more glamorous features. The password generator. The password health dashboard. The face-down lock. The video messages.
The Emergency Card is not glamorous. It is not clever. It is a structured form with an export button and a single-row database constraint keeping it unique per vault.
And it is, by our usage metrics, the feature most often opened, most often updated, and most often exported. Because it solves a problem most vault apps don't even try to solve: the case where the vault itself isn't the right answer. Where the family needs the answer now, and the answer needs to be readable without any of the protections that exist for the other 99% of your information.
We built SecureKeep around the idea that your vault should work for your family as much as it works for you. The Emergency Card is the clearest expression of that idea we know how to make.
Related reading:
- Why SecureKeep Has No Login Screen: The Local-Only Vault Explained
- Leave Your Voice: Why We Added Video and Audio Messages
- The 10-Minute Family Information Kit
SecureKeep is a $7.99 one-time-purchase encrypted vault for iOS and Android. Multi-vault, emergency cards, video messages, password health — all encrypted locally, no cloud account required. See all features →