About Help Now Medical Alert
We are a family business that has been answering emergency calls since 1981. Not a startup, not a reseller, and not a company you will struggle to reach.
Who we actually are
Help Now Medical Alert is the nationwide service of Bay Area Vital Link, Inc., founded in 1981 by Arthur Hoffman and still owned and run by the same family from our office at 6529 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, California.
For most of those years we served the San Francisco Bay Area directly, installing systems in people’s homes ourselves.
Help Now is how we bring the same service to the rest of the country: the same equipment, the same monitoring centers, and the same people answering the phone in Oakland. The only difference is that your system arrives by mail and takes a few minutes to set up, instead of one of us driving to your house.
Who answers when you press the button
Both monitoring centers are in the United States, in Utah and Idaho, and they are fully redundant: if one cannot answer, the other does. They are certified, not just staffed.
- At-home systems are answered at two ETL-certified centers in Utah, by EMD-certified emergency medical dispatchers.
- Mobile systems are answered at a UL-Listed, TMA Five Diamond Certified center, which The Monitoring Association named Monitoring Center of the Year in 2022.
A trained operator talks to you through the speaker in the device. They already have your name, your address, your medical information and the people you want called, because that was on file before anything happened.
They are not reading from a script in another country, and there is no robot deciding whether your call matters.
What we believe, including the awkward parts
- We will tell you when we are not the right answer. Our guides say plainly where these systems fall short. They do not stop someone with dementia from leaving the house. They only work if the button is actually worn. And where there is no landline and no cell signal, nothing works, ours included. We would rather lose a sale than have someone buy the wrong thing.
- No contracts. Month to month, cancel whenever, and a 30-day money-back guarantee from the day it arrives.
- We do not raise the rate on an existing customer. The price you start at is the price you keep.
- The equipment is included. There is nothing to buy, and returning it is what ends the billing.
- Veterans and Meals on Wheels recipients save $5 a month, on any system, for as long as they have it.
Why the founding year matters more than it sounds.
A medical alert system is only worth anything if the company is still there in five years to answer the call.
This industry does have a lot of companies that appeared recently, spend heavily on advertising, and change hands within a few years. There are good long-established exceptions too, and you should look for them.
So ask any provider how long they have been doing this, and ask us the same question. Our answer is 1981.
Talk to a person
Call (866) 743-7348 and someone here will answer. If you would rather read first, the buyer’s guide is written to be useful even if you buy from someone else, and what it costs puts the price next to every other kind of help.
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Help Now Medical Alert is a division of Bay Area Vital Link, Inc. · 6529 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA 94609 · (866) 743-7348