New Children's Hospital iPhone App Is Reassuring

It's pretty much common sense that if your kid gets a sliver, you take it out. But what if it's a really big, really deep one that you can't remove?  In her foot, so it hurts when she walks? And it's 5 p.m. so you'd have to go to the emergency room for medical care? The new St. Louis Children's Hospital iPhone app, called Kid Care, can help.

It's a searchable listing of 88 general categories like insect bites, cough, diarrhea and sunburn -- many of the common things I've wondered about myself. All the info is available online already, on the hospital's homepage, but what makes the iPhone app appealing is portability. Most likely, when your child knocks out a tooth he's not going to do it right next to the computer.  You might have your phone nearby, in which case you could call the hospital's answer line at . But if you have an iPhone, you can skim through a pretty comprehensive summary of the symptoms and home-care remedies. Best of all, it lays out when an injury or illness starts to fall into the emergency range, which the site calmly headlines "Call Your Doctor Now (night or day)." (In case you're wondering, I'm going with the info on the homepage because I have a droid, not an iPhone. No word on when/whether the app will become available on other 3G systems.)

The Kid Care app relies on clinical protocols widely used across the United States and Canada -- which means you're looking at the same info as doctors and nurses at 10,000 practices and 400 nurse advice call centers. To download the app, click here.