Epi Reminder, a nifty app using trusted technology makes it possible to crowd source near by epinephrine in the case of anaphylaxis emergencies. Call us intrigued.
Keeping Track of your EAIs
By Toni Taylor
January 20, 2023
Our association is always watching for new ideas, innovations and technology helping individuals and family members with life-threatening allergies. We know from first-hand experience how much support people at risk for anaphylaxis really need every day.
In pursuit of our shared goal of not another life lost to life threatening allergies, the focus of the Epi Near You New York program is broad based availability of epinephrine. This includes teaching everyone in New York State how to recognize when and how to administer it.
A few scenarios help focus the program. You might be dropping your food allergic kids at day care and want to transfer the EAIs you always have on hand to the day care staff and to retrieve them at the end of the day.
Imagine a situation that your brother has an undiagnosed food allergy having his first anaphylaxis reaction over dinner. You’ve taken an epi training course and know what’s happening but you don’t know where there might be some epinephrine.
Liz Tang, the mother of a food allergic child, who has a background of successful start ups, has started a company, EpiReminder, an app based approach to keeping track of where your EAIs are, as well as anyone near by who might have an EAI when you might need one.
The app is based on air tag technology, similar to Tile Tracker on your keys, that helps families keep track of where the EAIs are in relation to their kids, as they move through the day; from home to school, to grandma’s, to day care.
For a very reasonable fee, families sign up, install the app on their phone and buy devices to attach to the EAI’s.
In the example of your brother’s first anaphylaxis response, the app can be used to find a nearby EAI you can use to save your brother’s life.
EpiReminder, the device and expanding network of users, is intriguing for a few reasons. First, it has the possibility of saving families money by lessening or perhaps eliminating the need to have 2 EAIs at multiple locations. It also helps you manage expiration dates and re-stocking.
Second, tracking nearby EAIs enhances community safety fits in with the goal of broad based EAI availability. As Tang puts it, “Epi Finder’s traveling-stock-epi nicely dovetails with Epi Near You New York’s stationary-stock-epi approach.”
As you can imagine, like many social networks, the more people in the network increases the value of broad-based availability of epinephrine to the community. While many of the early adopters of EpiReminder are in California, it is important that we in New York State do our bit. We should build a dense New York State user base for this technology to demonstrate the ability of our community to crowdsource epinephrine in an emergency.
There are questions to be answered as the roll out continues. First, those at the next table who offer their EAIs that save your food allergic brother with his first anaphylactic reaction need an efficient way of being reimbursed with minimum effort on their part. As part of the early roll-out, EpiReminder is offering to reimburse anyone who needs to replace their auto-injector after giving it to someone else in an emergency through EpiReminder’s SOS process.
Good Samaritan laws already protecting community members who administer non-patient-specific epinephrine might also need a bit of beefing up to cover those who provide their EAIs to someone else in an emergency.
For those who know that epinephrine is a life saver to those who need it immediately and harmless to everyone else, these questions seem a bit much. But in a world where legislation is required to make us all safer, they are important questions to consider as we encourage any way to increase the broad based availability of epinephrine in New York State in as many ways as possible, including safely expanding the network of Epi Reminder.
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