The days of guessing how much medicine to give your child are over.  Catawba Valley Medical Center, Dr. Jim Broselow, an emergency physician knows the frustration of trying to give children the right amount of medicine, and if it’s too little or too much, the child could land in the emergency room.

That’s why he helped develop a new color-coded method of measuring liquid oral medications.  The Color Coding Kits Oral Dosing Kits will help ensure children receive the proper amount of fever-reducing medicine. It’s a product he hopes will help avoid unnecessary trips to the ER by getting the child’s fever down overnight, so they can see their regular doctor in the morning.

Catawba Valley Medical Center became the first hospital in the nation to sponsor the introduction of an oral medication dosing kit for use at home, which assigns a child a color based on their weight or height.  The colors correspond to lines along a syringe that mark the appropriate amount of medication to give the children between the ages of 2 and 12.

“We get calls at all hours from concerned parents regarding fevers,” said Dr. David Peltzer of Newton Family Physicians and medical director of AccessCare of Catawba County.  “They are often unsure of what dose to provide.”

The hospital intends to begin introducing the kits gradually through physicians in the AccessCare of Catawba County network, a group of primary care physicians providing care to those on Medicaid, Medicare and the uninsured.

Families in the healthcare network can voluntarily enroll their children in the program to receive the free kits.  CVMC will track the impact of Color Coding Kids Oral Dosing Kits on fever-related trips to emergency rooms.  The hospital expects those numbers to drop if students are getting enough medication at home.

“We hope the kits help parents avoid these visits and give them a greater sense of comfort when dosing fever medicine for their children,” Peltzer said.

Each kit includes a color-coded wall chart, the color-coded syringe, and adapter for medicine bottles and instructions written in English and Spanish.  If the weight of the child is unknown, the colored-coded wall chart can be used to measure the child’s height to assign the appropriate color, though Peltzer said the weight is a better method of measure.

Broselow, a former emergency room physician at CVMC, and his partner, Dr. Bob Luten, developed the new system based on a practice performed in emergency rooms across the nation.  He said hospital emergency rooms have used a similar system since the 1980s, but this if the first effort to try to implement the same strategies at home to improve child healthcare and reduce unnecessary trips to the hospital.

Dr. Rebecca Tart said each local physician involved with the AccessCare program has been trained in using and administering the kits.

She said 3,000 of these kits have already been distributed to local physicians.  More than 200 children have been enrolled in the study.

The hospital purchased 10,000 kits total to be distributed in Catawba County.

The biggest impact of the kit will be made with children between 2 months old and 2 years old since they are at an age when the majority of medications are in liquid form, Dr. Rebecca Tart said.