Life Alert- The “Help, I’ve Fallen and Can’t Up” Medical Alert System.
Life Alert is one of the pioneers in the medical alert industry. Sometime in the late 1980’s a television commercial was produced that portrayed an elderly woman named Mrs. Fletcher who pushed her medical alert pendant after falling in her bathroom. When the emergency dispatcher asked her if she is okay, Mrs. Fletcher utters the now infamous words “Help, I’ve Fallen and Can’t Get Up”. Then, of course, the dispatcher sends the ambulance. This phrase was so impactful that it has appeared on apparel and has been used by many comedians. Life Alert apparently feels so strongly about the importance of this catchphrase that is now a registered trademark of the Life Alert Company.
Life Alert is currently headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and has satellite offices in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. It is a privately held firm so there is not a lot of public information about the number of subscribers that they actually monitor. One of the unusual things about Life Alert is that it appears as though they do their medical alert system monitoring out of one location located within their corporate office in California. Almost all other medic alert companies have two or three monitoring centers. The reason to have multiple monitoring centers is simple … redundancy. If one monitoring center gets hit by an earthquake, hurricane, or destroyed by fire the redundant monitoring centers can handle the alarms hopefully without missing a beat.
Life Alert was one of the first companies to enter the medical alert system arena. They went to market differently than most of their competitors at the time and they still do things differently than almost all of the emergency response system companies currently in existence today. Life Alert does not disclose any pricing on their website and they almost always require a three-year contract. Life Alert came to prominence with the advent of a commercial that may well exist for quite a long time. It is up to their potential customers whether transparency and long-term contracts are good or bad.
For more information on medical alert systems in Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, and across the United States, visit Vital-Link today!
Life Alert® is a registered trademark.
