hospital route optimiser wip

My girlfriend is a paramedic, and apparently at night when someone comes in, they're working off a shared Excel spreadsheet to figure out which hospitals have the right department open. She asked me to build an app: enter your location, specify the department (cardiac, neuro, spinal, etc.), and get back a ranked list of hospitals that can handle it — with the on-call number if it's after hours.

Returning a sorted JSON list is pretty straightforward, but there are a few things to think about when it comes to live traffic data without blowing the free monthly quota on the Maps API. The plan is to use the Places API for an initial proximity filter, then only fire Directions API calls against the shortlist. Cross-region use is also a real requirement — paramedics covering the far side of Melbourne need this to be useful too, not just the nearest suburb. Building in React Native so it runs on both iOS and Android without maintaining two separate codebases.