Symptom Checker
Safe Symptom Guidance for Parents
Trusted, evidence-based guides that help parents assess how sick their child is, make safe decisions, and gain peace of mind.
Supporting Safe Triage by Parents for
Efficient Pediatric Healthcare
Pediatric Symptom Checker (SC) Care Guides are evidence-based decision-support tools designed to help parents quickly assess symptoms and choose the appropriate level of care. They give families a trusted, consistent framework for evaluating common childhood illnesses and injuries—day or night, at home or wherever they are, and without guesswork.
These guides teach parents when they do or don’t need to worry. They provide a reality check and reassurance. Detailed home care advice is also included. For parents who use our SC guides, over half the time they don’t need to see or even call a doctor.
Teach your families to use a trusted resource, not reach for their phone or car keys.
Symptom Checker
Care Guides:
Content at a Glance
- 172 guides for parents covering common symptoms, illnesses, and injuries.
- Trusted triage and care advice based on protocols used by telehealth nurses.
- Logical, safe triage checklists.
- Practical, easy-to-understand home care instructions.
- Clinical content updated annually.
- New guides developed rapidly to address any disease outbreaks.
- Available in English, Spanish, and French.
Core Benefits of Symptom Checker Care Guides
For Parents and Other Caregivers
- Helps parents triage their sick child and determine: “Do I need emergency care, office care, or only care at home?”
- Provides 24/7 immediate access to decision support, no matter where they are.
- For illnesses safe to treat at home, provides detailed home care advice without ever calling a doctor or nurse.
- Builds parent confidence in managing common illnesses on their own.
For Doctors and Other Providers
- Makes your website the evidence-based source of medical truth for your families.
- Reduces unnecessary office hours and after hours calls.
- Refers appropriate calls to telehealth nurses and call centers.
- Helps practices that can’t hire enough telehealth nurses offload calls that don’t need nurse expertise.
Built on Decades of
Trusted Clinical Triage
- Based on the triage reasoning and decision logic in our Pediatric After Hours and Office Hours Triage Protocols
- All guides are written and reviewed by our pediatric editorial team
- Emergent and urgent care topics are reviewed by emergency medicine physicians
- Specialty topics are reviewed by pediatric subspecialists
- Continuously updated and tested in real-world, clinical settings
Healthcare Impact of Our Pediatric Symptom Checker (SC) Care Guides
For more than 20 years, our Pediatric Symptom Checker Care Guides have supported pediatric practices by giving parents a reliable, evidence-based way to evaluate symptoms at home, reducing unnecessary phone calls or walk-ins, and improving care efficiency across North America.
- Created in 2000 for use on pediatric practice websites, becoming the first consumer-facing symptom checker in the world
- Updated annually to ensure accuracy and safety for families
- Expanded to smartphones in 2008 with the release of the first symptom checker as a mobile app
- Used by over 1000 pediatric offices on their practice websites to guide parents at home
- Adopted by over 20 children’s hospitals to support families across their regions, with several integrating the Symptom Checker directly into MyChart
- Selected by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2016 as their official Symptom Checker and featured on healthychildren.org, their website for parents.
Indexes for SC Care Guides
Samples of SC Care Guides
A Full Age Range Symptom Checker for Adults, Children, and Teens
Our pediatric symptom checker guides cover children and teens. Our partner Self Care Decisions has created matching symptom checker guides that cover adults. Their medical editorial team includes full age range physicians who modified our symptom checker guides to provide safe triage for patients of all ages.
Where to Get Symptom Checker (SC) Care Guides
SC Care Guides are available to license from:
- Self Care Decisions (SCD). The exclusive licensor of our symptom checker content and a trusted partner of healthcare systems across North America
- RemedyConnect. The leading creator of websites for pediatric offices uses our symptom checker content as a core component in these websites.
- Clearstep. An innovative patient access and engagement system using our symptom checker content as the basis for their triage.