Pronto Soccorso Lazio: choosing where to go, in real time
Android app showing emergency room waiting times across the Lazio region and suggesting the best facilities based on where the user actually is.
- Role
- Concept, architecture, development and release
- Status
- Published on Google Play
- Stack
- Android, Java, REST API, Public data
- Published on Google Play as dev.matteuo.prontosoccorsolazio
- Emergency room waiting times across Lazio, readable at a glance
- Facility suggestions based on the user's location
- Dedicated public website for the project
The problem
When you need an emergency room, the question is not only which one is closest, but where will I wait least. Those are different questions, and they can lead to opposite answers: the hospital ten minutes away may have several hours of queue, while one slightly further out is nearly empty.
The information exists and is public. The problem is the shape it comes in: tables designed for desk consultation, scattered per facility, hard to read at exactly the moment they matter — in a hurry, on a phone, in a state where nobody wants to parse a spreadsheet.
This is not a technology problem. It is an access-to-information problem.
Design decisions
Location as the primary criterion, not a filter. The app does not simply list facilities with their waiting times: it combines wait and distance to suggest the ones that actually make sense for whoever is looking at the screen right now. That is the user’s real question, not the one that is easiest to implement.
Readability before completeness. In an urgent situation, a screen dense with data is a useless screen. The visual hierarchy puts the answer first — where you should go — and pushes detail to a second level, for those who want it.
No account, no sign-up. The app opens and shows the information. Requiring registration to consult public data would have been unjustified friction, as well as collecting personal data with no real need for it.
Tolerance for missing data. Public sources are neither always complete nor always reachable. The app is built to degrade transparently: better to state that a figure is unavailable than to show a stale one as if it were current. With health information, trust matters more than coverage.
The artefact
The application is published on Google Play, alongside a dedicated project website. It is the case where architecture matters less than the outcome: the value is not in the stack, but in the fact that already-public information became usable at the moment it is actually needed.