A San Francisco-based company founded by a Keralite has developed a new mobile app MUrgency to provide emergency medical assistance to people in developing countries. MUrgency is a cloud platform and mobile application which will connect people in need of medical assistance through its network, which is connected to verified professionals. The app will make the nearest emergency responder (nurse, doctor, paramedic, ambulance etc.) available to a person facing a medical emergency.

The app is launched in global partnership with Business Call to Action at the United Nations Development Program, Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum, Stanford ChangeLabs, Harvard Asia Center and MIT Global Health. It will be launched in India by August 2015 in the state of Punjab and will cover the whole country by January 2018. The founder of the app is Shaffi Mather, an Indian America entrepreneur.

A trial run of the app was already done in Punjab, Dubai and Israel. The results show that the app reduces the response time to less than half of what it takes an ambulance in an efficiently run ambulance system to reach the emergency victim. In Israel, the app has brought down the response time to 2.54 minutes from the earlier 8-12 minutes.

The Global Responder enrollment, validation and onboarding is done by Ziqitza Health Care Limited, India’s and the developing world’s largest emergency ambulance service company.

According to MUrgency’s founder and CEO Shaffi Mather, “It is well known that timely medical assistance is the most critical factor in saving lives. Unfortunately, it is not readily available to 90 percent of world’s population. At MUrgency, it is our mission to make fast emergency medical assistance available through the mobile phone to anyone, anytime, anywhere across the world by 2020 with just one tap on your phone.”

According to WHO estimates, more people die from lack of timely care than from AIDS, TB and malaria combined.