iPhone App Locates Specialized Emergency Center Nearest to You

If you have an iPhone, chances are you use it daily to find the places you need to go, including health care providers. However, although most hospitals are equipped for general medical emergencies, certain hospitals have specialists for specific conditions immediately available. For example, there are hospitals that have designations as "stroke centers" that can rapidly mobilize the necessary equipment and personnel for acute stroke treatment, and the same goes for eye emergencies and pediatric trauma. Now there's an app that finds the specialized center closest to you based on the type of emergency you're facing.

Appropriately named, the Emergency Medical Center Locator has you select a type of emergency from a list consisting of burn, cardiac, eye, pediatric, stroke, and trauma. The criteria for selecting these designations isn't clearly explained in the app or on the website, but on a test run of the app here in Houston, the results seemed appropriate based on this editor's experience rotating through most of the hospitals in our medical megalopolis. You can also enter an international location, and indeed, two pediatric hospitals, a heart hospital, and a general hospital near Bangkok were located quickly.

Dr. Bruce Moskowitz, founder and chairman of the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation, and creator of the Emergency Medical Center Locator App, had the following to say:

"Since the app was released we are pleased that it has been used by several medical centers and individuals worldwide. The most recent two cases were a young man who required emergency surgery and through the information in the app was moved to a specialized emergency facility in Bangkok, Thailand, and a young woman who fractured her ankle in Bolivia and used the app to find an appropriate orthopedic facility. In the U.S., a woman had an acute eye emergency while visiting friends in Ohio and used the app to locate the nearest ophthalmology emergency room, which helped to save her vision. Having information on the closest specialty emergency center geo-tagged to your location assists in getting to a center with the proper expertise to treat the problem at hand in a timely manner."

• iTunes Link: EMCL App

Image: Emergency Medical Center Locator.

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This post also appears on medGadget, an Atlantic partner site.