About the National Capital Poison Center

Mission

Our mission is to prevent poisonings, save lives, and limit injury from poisoning by providing free, expert, online guidance, 24/7. Our services optimize poisoning outcomes and decrease health care costs.

webPOISONCONTROL was launched in 2014 to meet the needs of users who do not want to or cannot call a poison center. A decade of case data, user reviews, and two peer-reviewed academic publications have shown the app to be highly effective. It offers an accessible alternative to traditional telephone-based poison centers, while maintaining the highest standards of care and safety, revolutionizing the way the public accesses guidance for possible poisonings. webPOISONCONTROL offers a safe, user-friendly, quick, and accurate self-guided interface to assess potential poison risks and determine immediate next steps. Available 24/7, the tool is particularly valuable in time-sensitive situations, providing customized recommendations based on age, substance, amount ingested, symptoms, time since the exposure and other factors.

While fulfilling this mission, we are committed to providing free guidance to everyone who reaches out for help with a poisoning, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, political view, or insurance coverage. When you contact us for help, we don’t ask about your background or views. We only need medically relevant information required to make appropriate triage and treatment recommendations. There is no judging. All of the information you provide is private and confidential.

We value: 

• Each and every one of our users.
  We strive to satisfy your needs and exceed your expectations. We are committed to making a difference and ensuring your safety.

• Excellence. 
  With integrity, respect, professionalism, expertise and innovation, we aim to provide the highest quality service, as efficiently as possible. It is your choice whether you want to be helped entirely online, by webPOISONCONTROL, or prefer to call a poison center.

• Public health. 
  We are dedicated to improving the public’s safety through unimpaired access to state-of-the art triage and treatment guidance, an unrelenting search for hazards, aggressive advocacy of hazard elimination, effective public education in poison prevention, and collaborations with public health partners.

We are committed to making your community a place where you and your family can be healthy and safe, especially from poisons, and to providing expert information so you can make informed decisions. It’s our small contribution towards empowering you and helping you thrive. 

Services

Online triage guidance for possible poisonings: The National Capital Poison Center manages webPOISONCONTROL, a fully-automated virtual Poison Control. webPOISONCONTROL provides online triage guidance for unintentional poisonings for those who cannot or prefer not to call a hotline for help. It's available through your browser at poison.org and as an app on the App Store or Google Play. The logic, algorithms and recommendations that power the tool are written by board-certified toxicology experts, each with decades of experience in poison centers.  

Poison prevention education, delivered through:

• poison.org, a website with more than 500,000 visits per month.

• The Poison Post®, an eNewsletter with updates on poisoning hazards and seasonal topics related to poisonings.

• Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube with time sensitive prevention and awareness messages.

• Press releases, interviews, radio and TV appearances, and public service announcements. 

Hazard detection and elimination through poisoning surveillance: Poisonings are best prevented by detecting unusual hazards and working with industry and regulatory agencies to reformulate, repackage or ban unnecessarily hazardous products before people are needlessly injured. The National Capital Poison Center has an active product surveillance program and has taken the lead in numerous regulatory petitions and industry and consumer alerts.  Further, the Center makes real-time poison exposure (anonymous) case data available to the public through the webPOISONCONTROL Data Analysis Dashboard.

Health care cost-containment: By handling 73% of poison exposure cases at home, webPOISONCONTROL helps poisoned patients avoid the cost, stress and anxiety of unnecessary emergency department visits and ambulance transports. Studies have shown that poison centers are cost effective, saving at least $6 for every dollar spent. Large newer studies have pegged the return on investment at $13 to $17 per dollar spent.

Redundancy: When telephone-based poison centers are overloaded due to public health or natural disasters, webPOISONCONTROL has the capacity to backstop the manpower-intensive phone services. Increased case volume on webPOISONCONTROL does not require additional personnel resources and added costs are negligible. While webPOISONCONTROL does not replace traditional poison centers, it can potentially offload a significant portion of the excess call center volume when the systems are stressed.

Case volume (2025)

157,792 human exposure cases managed online through webPOISONCONTROL:

• 72.2% managed at home

• 24.2% referred to call a poison center to determine whether an ER visit was necessary or to get nuanced instructions

• 3.6% referred directly to an ER

• 91.4% of cases from the US; 8.6% international

• 50.3% nonpharmaceutical, 49.7% nonpharmaceutical exposures

• 52.5% of cases in children younger than 6 years; 24.0% in children one year old or younger

Annual budget

The Center's annual budget is $3.5 million, supported through grants and contributions.

Our history

The National Capital Poison Center was founded in 1980 at the request of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Over the subsequent decades, the Center managed more than 1.3 million calls from the public and health care professionals, predominantly from the metro DC area. The Center became a leader in hazard detection and surveillance, uncovering previously unrecognized product hazards and advocating for regulatory action and public awareness to improve safety. One such effort involved the establishment of a National Button Battery Ingestion Hotline (1982-2018) and the identification of the potentially lethal 20 mm lithium button cell ingestion hazard. The Center’s staff also managed the national poisoning database (Toxic Exposure Surveillance System) for two decades (1983-2004).

Innovation: In 2012, noting a downturn in public utilization of poison center hotlines and a trend towards use of the internet for health information, even in a poison emergency, the National Capital Poison Center invested in building an online tool to provide a trusted resource for those who just would not or could not call for help. The resulting webPOISONCONTROL online browser-based tool and app have managed more than 1.1 million poison exposures.

Financial woes and transitions: The National Capital Poison Center was initially hosted by Georgetown University Hospital. In 1994, after reaching the brink of closure for financial reasons, the Center left its home at Georgetown University and became an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, affiliated with The George Washington University School of Medicine. That organizational status persists to this day.

Three decades later, yet another financial crisis forced the closure of the call center on March 31, 2025. Inadequate governmental funding caused a deficit approaching half of the center’s operating cost. For 44 years the National Capital Poison Center's call center had been a trusted resource, providing expert guidance during poison emergencies, saving countless lives and decreasing healthcare costs. Fortunately, there was no interruption in call center services as the individuals in Washington DC, Northern Virginia and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland now have their choice of getting help with poisonings online through the Center’s fully automated digital tool, webPOISONCONTROL, or by continuing to call the toll-free national poison center number 1-800-222-1222. Calls from areas previously served by the National Capital Poison Center are now re-routed to neighboring poison centers in Maryland and Virginia where call center services are consolidated.

Importantly, the National Capital Poison Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, did not close. Instead it took on a new role as the first fully-automated, all-digital Poison Control, now serving the entire US. This transition was enabled by webPOISONCONTROL, the organization’s innovative and cost-effective online tool for triage and treatment guidance for poison exposures. The National Capital Poison Center no longer manages poison exposures by phone, instead referring those who want or need to call to the US poison center serving their location.

Other information

• Administrative phone: 202-362-3867 (not for advice about poisonings)

• Email: pc@poison.org 

  If you email an inquiry, please provide your name, address, and phone number. We cannot provide medical or poisoning advice by email. If you have a question about a possible poisoning, use the webPOISONCONTROL tool or call your poison center at 1-800-222-1222 in the US.

Websites:

• poison.org

• webPOISONCONTROL.org

• triage.webPOISONCONTROL.org