Quality Content: Evidence-based Decision Support
You Want Reliable, Tested Decision Support
We have designed our symptom care guides for use by consumers. They are derived from the most widely-used telephone care protocols in the world. The Telephone Triage Protocols are used in over 400 medical call centers in the United States and Canada (95% of North American market). They have been the preferred decision-support tool in medical call centers since 1994 and tested in more than 200 million symptom calls.
The Schmitt-Thompson protocols are based on the following resources and evidence:
- National Guidelines and Policies (e.g., AAP, AAFP, ACEP, ACOG, CDC, FDA, AHA, ADA and other national organizations)
- The medical literature, including Cochrane reviews
- Expert reviewers (more than 100)
- Published research studies on the protocols (11)
The care advice in our content sets is consistent with what primary care physicians tell their patients. Many physicians and nurses refer to them as the standard of care.
In 2015, a group of Harvard physicians evaluated all the symptom checkers on the market. In their published study, they noted, “Symptom checkers that used the Schmitt or Thompson nurse triage protocols were more likely to provide appropriate triage decisions…” (BMJ 2015; 351:h3480).