CHAMPAIGN — You’re driving to the grocery store, and suddenly your child starts breaking out in hives! Where do you find medical care in a hurry?

If you have Internet access in your car, you can now pull over and check the locations and current wait times at all Christie Clinic and Carle convenient care centers in the area, and make your choice accordingly.

Christie Clinic just started making its convenient care wait times available online, and Carle’s convenient care wait times have been on the web for about two years, and its hospital emergency room wait times have been online since January.

For smartphone users, there’s more.

Carle started listing its wait times on iTriage — a free health care download for iPhone and Android mobile devices — in January, and Christie Clinic is now doing likewise.

The iTriage application provides information about the nearest medical facilities, medical providers, symptoms and treatment options.

Not all providers list their wait times. Christie and Carle are among about 100 providers nationwide on iTriage currently providing that information to their patients, and most of them are hospitals, according to Marcia Noyes, spokeswoman for Healthagen, the Colorado company that developed iTriage.

Healthagen is only just beginning to see more urgent and convenient care centers adding their wait times, she said.

How much do today’s patients want to know how long they’re going to have to wait?

Carle has found thousands of people look at this information every month, and the comments received by convenient centers staffs and email indicate people rely on it, according to Carle’s manager of interactive communications, Matt Dewey.

“It’s definitely a piece that we get feedback on often,” he said.

Each month, about 2,500 people check to see what the wait time is at a Carle convenient care center or the Carle emergency room, he said.

At Christie Clinic, patients are just beginning to find this new feature is available, said spokeswoman Karen Blatzer.

But, she said, "we expect it will have more impact in the fall. Usually, it's slower in the summertime."

Convenient care traffic picks up in the fall because school starts, kids get together again in the classroom, and germs spread, she said. After that, cold weather and flu season kick in.

Healthagen said iTriage — developed by two emergency room physicians — strives to answer the two most commonly-asked health care questions: What could be wrong with me, and where could I go for treatment?

There are more than 220 million smartphone users in the U.S. over the age of 13, and 23 percent of them use these devices to find hospitals and 36 percent use a smartphone for doctor searches, according to the company's website.

Among the users who tend to benefit the most are people new to a community and those traveling who don't know who and where the providers are, Noyes said.

Blatzer said Christie Clinic is making this extra information and wait times available as an added convenience for local patients — but also envisions all the out-of-town visitors who are unfamiliar with local medical facilities and might need to find medical care fast.

She was in that situation herself, recently, when she was in Florida with her family and had a case of pinkeye, she said.

She used her smartphone and iTriage and it located a convenient care center right near their hotel, she said.

Convenient care wait times on the web:

http://www.christieclinic.com

http://www.carle.com

Download iTriage: http://www.iTriageHealth.com

Note: Carle's convenient care wait times are temporarily missing this week from iTriage due to a glitch, Carle officials say.