Emergency care

You, a family member or your insurer's assistance center messages Relevium on WhatsApp. An Emergency Medicine specialist — not a call-center agent — answers, takes the clinical history and decides the level of care the case needs: an outpatient visit, an emergency-room evaluation, or direct hospital admission.

If the patient needs to be seen, we tell you exactly which hospital to go to and we notify the emergency department that the patient is on the way. When transport is part of the problem — a remote beach, a mountain lodge, a cruise port — we coordinate a ground ambulance or, when clinically justified, an air transfer to San José.

Costa Rica's public emergency number is 911. Call it first if someone is unconscious, not breathing or bleeding heavily. Relevium works alongside the public response, not instead of it: once the patient is stable, we take over the private-hospital admission, the specialist coordination and the paperwork.

Relevium admits patients at Hospital Clínica Bíblica (central San José and the Aleste campus) and Hospital Internacional La Católica in Guadalupe — accredited private hospitals with 24-hour emergency departments, intensive care, imaging and operating rooms on site. Most international insurers already have these facilities in their networks.

For patients on the Pacific coast or in Guanacaste we coordinate initial stabilization at the nearest private clinic and, when the case requires it, transfer to San José, where every one of our 33 specialties is available within hours. Distances in Costa Rica are short in kilometres but long in road time; deciding early whether a transfer is needed is often the most important decision of the case.

In most private hospitals, an emergency patient is seen by whoever is on shift and then handed from specialist to specialist. Relevium keeps one treating physician of record on the case from the first message to discharge. That physician performs or supervises the initial assessment, orders the studies once, calls the right specialist directly, and speaks to the family and the insurer in plain English.

For insured patients this matters twice: clinically, because decisions stay consistent; administratively, because the guarantee of payment, the pre-authorization and the medical reports are opened in parallel with treatment — not after it.

Trauma from road accidents, surfing, zip-lining and hiking; chest pain and cardiac events; abdominal pain, appendicitis and gallbladder attacks; severe dehydration and gastrointestinal infections; dengue and other tropical fevers; allergic reactions and asthma exacerbations; and the acute decompensation of chronic conditions — diabetes, hypertension, heart failure — far from home.

Every case ends with a structured medical report in English (see the sample on our home page) and, when the patient is flying home, a fit-to-fly assessment.