The Nephron Information Center announces a Disaster Ready Web Page


(Houston, May 16, 2006) - The Nephron Information Center announced a web site that will be downloadable from conventional mobile devices such as RIM's Blackberry as well as web-enabled cell phones and PDAs. It will contain basic information for dialysis patients who are in the process of evacuating during a hurricane or other disaster. This will include hotlines phone numbers to Newworks, the National Kidney Foundation and dialysis chains. As well, it will capture from dialysisunits.com those facilities that have temporarily closed during a disaster.

By providing this information in a format that does not require a desktop or notebook computer, and creating the information in a format that can be easily viewed on mobile device, patients will be able to save valuable time when traveling, and also save battery and processor time. During an evacuation, there is not only massive and slow moving traffic congestion on the highways, but also cell phone traffic, and the long waits to access conventional wises are not possible. The site for this will be hh.nephron.com. An alternate site is hh.dialysisunits.com.

The Nephron Information Center hosts dialysisunits.com a database of all the Medicare approved dialysis facilities in the USA. Recently, the program was adapted so that designated members of the ESRD Networks could have access to a field showing whether a unit was closed or not. This field is searchable and can readily be seen using a laptop. In addition, when activated, the code will populate the hh site.

The National Kidney Foundation is hosting a website at kidney.org, which will become a central site for important disaster information. In the event of an impending disaster one is encouraged to visit the NKF's. The Nephron Information Center uses proprietary software that aggregates news and current events, sorts, organizes and renders it to the web. During a disaster this page is focused on important events and news items and should also be reviewed. The site is at http://nephron.org/disaster.

Special thanks to Brian Rosenthal of robocommerce.com for developing the dialysisunits.com technology and porting system that makes this tool possible. Robocommerce develops automated software applications for e-commerce business.

It is recommended that, given the traffic jam problems of the past in each evacuation effort, patients take a cell phone charger outfitted for the automobile. Whenever possible, it is best to use a mobile phone that has web and SMS capabilities.