IRVING, Texas -
When a
medical emergency strikes, every second counts. But can a smartphone app really
save your life?
"Well I'm
convinced he would have died if I had waited," said Melissa Ketterer.
Melissa says
an app on her iPhone helped save her husband's life. One day in April, Bob
Ketterer, with no sense of alarm, said his right arm felt numb. Melissa typed
Bob's symptoms into an app called iTriage.
"And it
pulled up numbness and the top of the list is stroke," Melissa said.
The app not
only warned of a possible stroke, it advised going straight to the emergency
room and gave directions to the closest one. Bob was having a stroke, and
doctors stopped it before he suffered major brain damage.
iTriage was
the brainchild of private app developers, but the app's inner working rely
heavily on data from the U.S. Government.
The app has
a list of doctors and clinics compiled by Medicare and other federal records. And
directions to the hospital came from the taxpayer launched GPS satellite
system. This marriage of smartphones, public information and private ingenuity has
helped drive an exploding app economy that's grown in value from zero to $20
billion in just four years.
The man
responsible for giving away what the government knows is the US Chief
Technology Officer, Todd Park.
"The
benefit to real people is there is a massively growing array of new services
products and applications that can help Americans take control of their own
health and health care," Park said.
"And you
don't need a master's degree to be able to use an app," said Melissa.
To Melissa
Ketterer, the benefits of the handheld information industry came clear on an
April afternoon. With her
husband's life in the balance, she had an app for that.
Again, that
app Melissa Ketterer used on her iPhone is called iTriage.
iTriage was the brainchild of private app developers, but the app's inner working rely heavily on data from the U.S. Government.
