Apple Just Made Emergency Medical ID Info Harder to Find on an iPhone, During an Emergency

Apple’s methods of finding a person’s emergency medical information has alway been poorly implemented, in my opinion, but in the latest version of iOS, it has been made even more difficult for someone to find an unconscious person’s emergency medical information on their iPhone.

By the way, The Apple Support article, “Make an emergency call from a locked iPhone,” is outdated, even though it shows that it was updated on Oct. 14, 2022. In the current version of iOS (16.0.3), making an emergency call and accessing Medical ID information no longer works as described in this article. The steps for this article need to be updated. I have also spoken to many Apple support staff who still believe that “Emergency Call” and “Medical ID” info can still be accessed from the lock screen, which is no longer the case.

On iPhone 8 and earlier, if someone was found unconscious, you could press the Home button of their iPhone to display “Emergency Call” and “Medical ID” on the lock screen. Since many people (especially non-iPhone users) would not know this if they found an iPhone next to an unconscious person, I created my own lock screen with my emergency medical information, so all they have to do is turn the iPhone on to see it.

Unfortunately, Apple has made 2 changes in the current iOS (version 16.0.3), which makes the process much more complicated for finding an unconscious person’s medical information…

Instead of pressing the Home button to access the person’s emergency medical information, you must now hold both the left and right side buttons simultaneously, then slide the “Medical ID” slider that appears on the screen, to the right, and then the medical information appears. In an emergency situation, most iPhone users will not remember those specific steps, and non-iPhone users will not be able to find them at all.

To make things worse, if someone has their emergency medical information on their lock screen (to make it easier for someone to find in an emergency), Apple now makes the Focus feature BLUR the lock screen during sleep hours, so it cannot be read. For example, if my “Bedtime” is set to 9 PM, but I am out late one evening at 10 PM, and someone finds me unconscious on the sidewalk, when they turn on my iPhone, all my medical information on the lock screen will be blurred out. I have not been able to find any settings in Focus, Sleep, Bedtime, or Do Not Disturb, to let me override the blurring of the lock screen. 

If you go to Settings / Wallpaper, you can select the Wallpaper and then turn the Blur function ON/OFF. But if you select the Lock Screen instead of the Wallpaper, the Blur ON/OFF button is missing. Could this be an oversight?

Also, if I go to Settings / Focus / Sleep / Customize Screens / Options, under “Sleep Screen,” it says, “This simplifies your iPhone Lock Screen and Apple Watch display to reduce distractions.” But even though I have this turned OFF, Sleep Focus STILL blurs my lock screen during scheduled sleep hours. There are so many overlapping functions between “Focus” and “Sleep” and “Bedtime” and “Do Not Disturb,” that it is hard to tell which of these (if not all of these) are causing the lock screen to blur.

If anyone has found a way to bypass the new lock screen blurring “feature,” please let me know.