Minor Holiday Mishaps & Illnesses Lead to Urgent Care Patient Boom

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), emergency physicians treated approximately 39,700 people for fall-related injuries during the 2010 holiday season. Recognizing that holidays offer no vacation from minor accidents and illness, the developer of the free consumer healthcare application iTriage® announced today that it has added holiday hours for premier urgent care providers.

This addition will help consumers more easily locate urgent care medical facilities that remain open to those in need of minor medical care during the holidays. With the app’s groundbreaking Symptom-to-Provider™ pathway, users can also identify the types of treatment that urgent care centers provide and avoid unnecessary trips to an emergency department, which can make holiday festivities anything but jolly.

FastMed, which operates a group of urgent care centers in North Carolina and Arizona, indicates that holidays have a significant impact on the number of patients seen. “Looking back to our latest holiday, Labor Day, we saw a 10-15% jump in patient volume when compared to any other day in September, clearly there is a need,” explained Reuel Heyden, FastMed North Carolina Marketing Director.

In New York, Neal Shipley, M.D., co-owner of Urgent Care Manhattan recognized early on that holidays would be instrumental to business and serving its community. “The whole point when we opened was to improve access to care, so not remaining open every day of the week and on all holidays just didn’t make sense.”

During the holiday season families come together to celebrate, and unfortunately bring viruses and illness. “iTriage will be providing essential information to those who struggle with knowing where to seek treatment at a time when few options exist,” said Peter Hudson, M.D., co-founder of iTriage, LLC. “While not all illness and injuries rise to the ER level, this pro-active approach of putting accurate holiday information into the hands of those who need it most will help everyone get back to celebrating the holiday.”

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of the fourth annual Urgent Care Awareness Week (November 14-20), developed by the Urgent Care Association of America (UCAOA) to bring more awareness about the role urgent care plays in our health care. By downloading iTriage, users of the app have access to more than 400 premium urgent care centers with holiday hours, and the phone numbers and addresses of more than 5,000 urgent care nationwide.

For the Media: To access high-resolution graphic images from iTriage, please go to http://about.itriagehealth.com/client-assets/.

About iTriage
Headquartered in Denver, CO and co-founded by two emergency physicians, iTriage offers a unique Symptom-to-Provider™ pathway that empowers patients to make better healthcare decisions. iTriage helps people answer the two most common medical questions: “What condition could I have?” and “Where should I go for treatment?” Millions of consumers around the globe have downloaded iTriage on their mobile devices and thousands of healthcare providers use iTriage to reach and communicate critical facility and service information to patients. For more information, please visit http://about.itriagehealth.com/.

iTriage, LLC
12265 W. Bayaud Avenue, Suite 300
Lakewood, CO 80228
www.iTriageHealth.com

Marcia Noyes, PR Director
mnoyes@healthagen.net

This release was published on openPR.