The medical symptom checker trusted by leading healthcare organizations.

The Symptom Checker is a powerful self-assessment tool designed to guide patients to the right care at the right time based on their symptoms. This digital tool helps users determine how sick they are and what the most appropriate action to take is — whether it's self-care, scheduling an appointment, or seeking emergency care. With more than 300 symptom care guides, it offers one of the most comprehensive resources available for healthcare organizations.

The Symptom Checker and the nurse triage protocols, from which it was derived, are both trusted by doctors and nurses. The Symptom Checker care guides are currently being utilized in hundreds of healthcare organization websites and portals, including more than 350 office websites and more than 30 mobile phone apps.

Our Symptom Checker has been reviewed and approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). In a 2015 study by Harvard physicians, researchers found that symptom checkers based upon the Schmitt nurse triage protocols were more likely to provide appropriate triage decisions. Ours ranked as the most reliable of the triage symptom checkers.

In 2020, the landmark study was repeated “to investigate whether and how symptom checkers’ capabilities have evolved since 2015 and how they currently compare..” For triage symptom checkers, our content was again the most accurate (Healthy Children). Researchers evaluated our content implemented on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ parenting website, healthychildren.org. The AAP licenses our symptom checker content for use on their healthychildren.org website and within their native mobile apps.

Our Symptom Checker provides two flexible formats to meet the needs of your organization and your patients:

Format #1: Chatbot Symptom Checker

• Conversational Interface: patients are guided through grouped questions about their symptoms, such as appearance, severity, and duration, in a conversational, user-friendly way.
• Personalized Summaries: the chatbot delivers actionable recommendations along with a summary of the user’s responses, categorized as pertinent positives and negatives (e.g., “you stated you do have” vs. “you stated you do not have”).

Format #2: Checklist Symptom Checker

• Transparent Structure: patients are presented with symptom scenarios ordered by severity, from most critical to least serious.
• Step-by-Step Decisions: this format helps users make informed decisions while building an understanding of symptom progression and care requirements.

Both formats use the same validated content authored by Barton Schmitt, MD, ensuring consistency and reliability across all user experiences.

Yes, our Symptom Checker is fully customizable to align with your organization’s branding and care pathways. Customization options include:

• Visual Branding: tailor the tool’s look and feel with your logo, color palette, font, and button styles.
• Care Recommendations: map specific actions—like “Call Your Doctor,” “Schedule an Appointment,” or “Start a Virtual Visit”—to your organization’s unique offerings, such as telehealth platforms, urgent care centers, and self-scheduling systems.

Absolutely. Our Symptom Checker is built on the gold-standard Schmitt protocols, trusted by healthcare professionals for more than 30 years. These protocols have been tested in 250+ million symptom calls and are used in 95% of nurse advice lines in North America.

Currently, the Symptom Checker is implemented in hundreds of healthcare organizations, including 500+ office websites and 30+ mobile phone apps. This content undergoes rigorous review by medical directors, primary care physicians, and nurses annually to ensure it reflects the latest medical guidelines and evidence.

Our content is updated annually by the physician-authors, ensuring alignment with the latest medical research, guidelines and national recommendations. Updates include new protocols for emerging health concerns, OTC dosage adjustments, and urgent health advisories. Because the content is hosted on our secure web servers, your team won’t need to manage any updates manually.

Patients can access your Symptom Checker on your website, patient portal, or mobile app. The tool features:

• Personalized Filtering: patients input their age and gender to ensure recommendations are tailored to their demographic.
• Easy Navigation: search for symptoms using body-area navigation, a keyword search, or an alphabetical index.
• Direct Connections: after receiving a recommended action, users can instantly connect to your organization’s services, such as scheduling tools or telemedicine platforms.

Our Symptom Checker offers numerous benefits for healthcare organizations, including:

• Reduced Staff Workload: decreases after-hours calls and offloads non-urgent inquiries from nurses and receptionists.
• Increased Patient Loyalty: patients and parents value having trusted, evidence-based tools available 24/7.
• Operational Efficiency: drives more value from your website and mobile apps by seamlessly connecting patients to the right care options.
• Quick Setup: the tool can be installed within minutes via an easy-to-embed iFrame, allowing for rapid deployment and ROI.

Your patients probably have a lot of questions, which you can easily answer when they are on site. But when they are elsewhere (home, work, traveling), this can become much more challenging. Our Symptom Checker app and our other tools offer a modern solution to consumer and patient health questions surrounding symptoms, child behavior and development, first aid guidelines, and medication dosages. Through a mobile app or web-based tool, you can support your clients’ healthcare decisions and provide 24/7 access to evidence-based care advice.

The Symptom Checker also acts as a referral engine. For every symptom checked, the recommended actions are to seek care or manage (minor) symptoms at home. We can connect every Seek Care outcome to your locations (ERs, Urgent Cares), your physicians (Find a Doctor) and your scheduling services for appointments and/or telemedicine.

Have more questions about how our tools can help? Get in touch now.

Yes! We have the following pre-built tools and features available that can be added to Symptom Checker:

• Parent Advice Messages
• Profile Management
• First Aid Guides
• Find/Map Your Physicians
• Dosage Tables
• Medication & Allergy Tracker
• Push Notifications
• Patient/Portal Access

We can also work with you to develop custom features that will complement your app offering.

Patients gain confidence and peace of mind through access to the best symptom checker that:

• Provides actionable decision support, especially during evenings, nights, and weekends.
• Offers a self-service option for tech-savvy patients and parents.
• Guides appropriate care actions, such as scheduling an appointment or visiting the ER when necessary.
• Builds self-care skills by offering evidence-based symptom relief for minor illnesses and injuries.

In addition to the Symptom Checker, your license includes access to:

• Parent Advice Messages: covering common behavior and wellness topics for children.
• First Aid Content: practical, illustrated guides for managing injuries and emergencies.
• Dosage Tables: accurate, age- and weight-specific dosing information for common over-the-counter medications.
• Spanish and French-Canadian Language Support: bilingual resources available for an additional fee.

These additional tools enrich the user experience and enhance your organization’s ability to meet diverse patient needs.

We use the term “engagement app” to refer to an app that acts as a holder for a suite of tools. These can include our tools (Symptom Checker, First Aid Guides, Find a Doctor, etc.), and/or your own organization’s tools.

A user of an engagement app will access all the available tools from a single place on their phone, providing easy access to information wherever and whenever they need it.

Our team combines consultative skills and advanced application design and engineering to deliver patient engagement apps and web-based tools that meet your healthcare organization’s needs and objectives. Everything about our apps and tools, other than the healthcare content itself, is customizable. We will work with you to apply your brand, color palette, and unique app names to the finished product. You can expect an engagement to follow the steps outlined below.

• Discover: we review and identify your objectives, audiences and requirements. We deliver a design document or storyboard for additional honing of concepts.
• You Choose: the functions, features and “look” you want.
• You Approve: the visual scope of work (SOW) we’ve assembled which captures your vision and intentions.
• We Create and Test; You Preview: once the app is complete, we both test for functionality and accuracy to reach a “thumbs up.”
• Launch: you apply your proven launch strategies; we share promotional best practices with your marketing team.
• Analysis: we tag every button and action so all ‘user events’ are captured and measurable. This supports a future of data-driven edits to optimize your success.

Dr. Barton Schmitt is the primary author of our self-triage content. He wrote the first book on pediatric telephone triage in 1980. He is a practicing pediatrician and has served as the Medical Director of the Pediatric Call Center at Children’s Hospital of Colorado since 1988.

Dr. Schmitt reviews and updates the existing triage topics on a yearly basis. The review includes input from nurses and physicians, consumers, statistical evidence (QI projects and research) and medical evidence (literature review), and feedback from a broad panel of reviewers. Important urgent changes are delivered on a timely basis, as changes occur in medicine. New care guides and topics are developed each year. All are evidenced-based, reviewed and referenced.

It starts with a conversation. We price the content based upon the type and size of organization you represent and the format of content deliverable which best suits your needs (website, mobile app, API). The basis for our pricing by organization type includes:

• Hospitals and Health systems: aggregate bed size
• Health plans, employers and countries: population or membership size
• Practices: the number of named, primary care providers

When you are ready to discuss the details, simply contact us.