Will you be my emergency contact?

When you’re dating, the question is a sign that you’ve made it to the this-is-really-serious category. When you’re friends, it’s a sign that you’re truly beloved or truly responsible. And if you’re related, it may mean that you will now be entered into a medical study together so scientists can figure out if sinus infections or anxiety run in your family.

What? That’s right. Researchers have begun experimenting with using emergency contacts gathered from medical records to build family trees that can be used to study the heritability of hundreds of different attributes, and possibly advance research into diseases and responses to medications.

“It’s a way of looking at genetics but without having any genetic data,” said Nicholas Tatonetti, a data scientist at Columbia University Medical Center and one of the researchers who came up with the novel approach, which was outlined in a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell.

The data set, which they are now making available to other institutions, contains anonymized information from about 2 million patients at Columbia University, Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The researchers are also sharing their algorithm so other hospitals can conduct their own studies using emergency contacts.