The VitalKey is a USB flash drive that people carry on a keychain for the purpose of storing medical history and health insurance information. It was developed by a group of physicians in Virginia in response to their frustration over the fact that reliable medical information is so rarely available to physicians when they need it outside of their own offices.

Despite numerous attempts by companies to address this widely recognized problem using personal health record (PHR) products, the seemingly intuitive PHR idea has yet to achieve market acceptance. The AARP, Markle Foundation and others have studied the PHR market and consumer opinions of PHRs and concluded that while consumers recognize the need to have greater control and ready access to their health information, the available products have two critical flaws:

1. They are inconvenient for patients to use, requiring that patients do the work of compiling their own health histories.

2. Physicians are generally suspicious of the accuracy of health information provided and edited by patients.

The VitalKey represents a new and apparently promising approach to the PHR challenge. Unlike seemingly similar devices, Vital Key contains information from the user’s actual medical records as documented in their physician’s office. VitalKey subscribers cannot directly edit their medical information. The company behind the VitalKey, Vital Data, LLC (based in Richmond, VA) acts as an information intermediary between subscribing patients and their physicians.

When a person orders a VitalKey, they provide their demographic, insurance, and doctors' information, and they sign medical record release forms authorizing the company to request their records on an ongoing basis from their physicians. VitalKey personnel contact the subscriber’s doctors on behalf of the subscriber to acquire medical record documentation. The company then organizes the subscriber's medical records are (often from multiple physicians) to create a holistic, consolidated, record. Paper documents are then scanned and categorized, and this information is downloaded onto the VitalKey. While the company hand-keys certain data, the majority of the information on a VitalKey is presented as scanned images of actual paper medical records.