Visual Symptom Checker
Picture this: Your child wakes you up from your sleep in the middle of the night complaining that they “don’t feel so good”, mentioning pain in their abdomen. You check their cheeks and feel that they are burning up. A thermometer confirms what you initially thought, your child has a fever. Now it is up to parents on what to do next. Do you wait it out tonight and see how they are feeling in the morning? Try to get a hold of your child’s care provider in the middle of the night? Or maybe go to urgent care or the emergency room?
An emergency room or urgent care visit could be helpful but offers a potentially very hefty bill. They could try their luck with googling their child’s symptoms but that could lead down a rabbit hole that gives a much grimer, false diagnosis. Plus, it can be very hard for parents to be expected to decipher well-laid out opinions from facts on certain parenting websites and child healthcare discussion forums.
While this probably is not how parents wish to spend their precious sleeping hours, this is a situation that parents all across the country have to deal with everyday. Every parent’s first priority is making sure their child is happy and healthy. If their child is sick, they’re first and only thought is how they can make them feel better. There is another option that parents might not even know they have. For example on a New York, NY Pediatrician website, there could be some free resources to help decipher symptoms, find the cause, and find at-home remedies to ease their child’s discomfort.
The best pediatrician will have a visual symptom checker tool on their website. This is a free, easy to use digital tool to understand a child’s symptoms. Using the tool is simple. Parents simply need to scroll over the body part the child is complaining about and click to find a library of relevant, factual, evidence-based information pertaining to that particular body part. Then, parents can cross-reference their child’s symptoms with the available information to conclude what could be causing the child’s illnesses and what they can do to help. Plus, this will also help indicate to parents on whether additional medical attention is necessary and it’s time to call the doctor.
With the ever-rising cost of healthcare in the country, parents are faced with a difficult decision. They want to ensure that their child is well taken care of and has access to all the medical care they need but they also have to consider the economic costs of unnecessary trips to the emergency room or urgent care. Utilizing free resources from your child’s health care provider is a great solution. You are still getting expert advice from a medical professional without having to make any late-night phone calls or having to pay an extra after-hours fee. Visual Symptom Checker. Plus, you will not need to worry about making any kind of claim through your insurance company, which can always be a very big pain in the neck and cause a lot of back and forth on how much is covered on the medical bill.
Next time your child is feeling ill, instead of immediately reaching for the phone, go online and check for any resources on your child’s care provider’s website first. If your child is only acutely ill, this could save you and your provider’s time trying to squeeze in an impromptu appointment in your provider’s already very busy schedule. If tools like a visual symptom checker are present, then you can start there before going straight to bringing your child to see a physician. This could be a great way to save time, money, and lots of headaches for you and your child’s physician. Check out your pediatrician’s website today to see what types of resources are available to you.
