This is a problem technology could dramatically reduce if each of us had a complete medical/medication history that was immediately accessible to the physicians/institutions treating us. That doesn't exist now unless you're getting all your treatment/meds from one company/hospital system (Ex: Kaiser). Right now if you (or your spouse/kid) are brought to the ER unresponsive the doc isn't going to know shit about what meds you are on, what you're allergic to or perhaps even why you're unresponsive in the first place... in the case that they do have information it is likely incomplete. It's not the slightest bit surprising this routinely leads to bad outcomes because doctors are guessing. Dr. William Yasnoff (MD & PhD Computer Science) has suggested the concept of "Health Record Banking." Similar to financial banking institutions would compete for the right to host your health data and providers could "withdraw" records and "deposit" records. Your smartphone would be a key portal to access this information securely. I'm not sure what the perfect solution is here but the Hacker News crowd is going to have to be the folks to fix this because government, doctors and insurance companies are not.