The global outbreak of H1N1 flooded hospital emergency rooms across the United States with ill children and adults. Art Kellermann, MD, director of RAND Health and an emergency medicine physician who helped develop a similar website for adults during the H1N1 flu virus crisis in 2009, says many of these patients could have been treated by their primary care physician or simply recovered at home.
To safely reduce demand on crowded emergency rooms, in 2009 a volunteer group of medical and public health experts developed a free web-based tool to help adults with the flu determine where and when to seek care. The tool was named “Strategy for Off-Site Rapid Triage.”
Now a pediatric version of the tool is being piloted in two hospital emergency rooms in the Washington, D.C., area: Children’s National Medical Center in the District of Columbia and Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va.
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