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Comment by rtrivedi | Hacker News Reader

I want to be as open as possible about where the data comes from. It's pretty darn important to understand potential flaws in the system and I'm hoping to identify and (help) fix it.

The data comes from http://www.medicare.gov/. If you dig deep enough you'll see that the government does extensive surveys on each hospital and tries to catalog everything.

Two important deficiencies in the data that I am thinking about:

(a) Data is updated in real time. (b) There is no existing mechanism for Health Scout to help updating the gov data.

I agree the above will take some work and I intend to try through Health Scout :)

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I'd suggest looking at openstreetmap for hospitals with emergency rooms. This might also give you an easy way to allow people to update the data.

OSM has http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dhospital

  amenity=hospital
  name=Royal London Hospital
  emergency=yes

Here's a query for the OSM tagged emergency rooms near me: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/7pL (move the map and press "run" and it will update)

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/coffee-directions/ has a "coffee finder" that will give directions, but replace "coffee" with "emergency room" and it suddenly has a much greater impact.

That query works better than just looking for hospitals.

At a glance the rest look okay, but I converted one of the results into a 24 hour clinic (which is a better semantic match for urgent care than hospital+emergency=yes).

I've been working on this over the weekend. Due to imported data, the quality of hospitals in OSM (for the US) is pretty low. There are hundreds of doctors offices, clinics and nursing homes that are listed as hospitals.

(I've been correcting the data in my region. I have the idea to do some analysis for the entire country and incite people to clean up their areas. The Medicare dataset mentioned in this thread really makes that easier.)

Thanks so much for this awesome app :) Multiple times in my past I've needed an app like this. If I may offer two suggestions:

- Can you show hospitals without average wait times? I just tried the app and it doesn't show me my preferred ER because medicare.gov doesn't have any wait time listed for it. That might weed out good ERs for no reason. (It's my HMO's hospital. I would travel 2 extra miles in nearly all cases for ER staff that have direct access to my medical records, the easy insurance situation, and the super easy followup with my doctors.)

- A way to search ERs by manually entering a location, not just showing the nearest. Unfortunately, my parents have a habit of calling me rather than calling 911 or just going to the nearest ER. While 99% of the time it's the ER near their home, sometimes I need to look it up. They're averse to learning any new app :(

Great ideas.

(1) I will add in the functionality to show nearby hospitals without average wait times. It seems easy enough and very useful without search functionality. FWIW, if the government doesn't report wait times, I default to the average ER wait time for your state. If there is no average ER wait time for your state, then I use the national ER wait time reported by the gov. May I ask where in the country you are located?

One thing to note, I explicitly query for hospitals within a 10 mile radius. I figure if it's more than 10 miles out, it's probably not worth the drive. Maybe I should rethink that assumption...

(2) The search functionality is definitely coming in an update. I've heard that it would be useful from numerous people.

> I default to the average ER wait time for your state.

Ahh, I did see that in the app after I wrote my comment, but that was the only thing I could think of that might affect the search results :/ I'm in San Francisco. 10 miles would cover most ERs in the city ;) but in more specific terms, the particular hospital I can't find is Kaiser SF, only ~2 miles away from me. I see hospitals 5+ miles further away in my list... so.

I wouldn't mind a view that opts out of wait times altogether too, or sort by travel time only. Most times I go it's serious enough that I rarely wait more than a few minutes, so I don't pay attention to wait times. And I definitely do a mental sort when presented with the ER a couple blocks away with the 20 minute wait, or the 20 minute away hospital with the super short wait time...

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