Calls to Vermont’s poison control center, which have long been answered at Vermont’s largest hospital, will soon go to an office in Maine.

The poison control centers in Maine and Vermont are joining forces to save money and standardize the information they provide.

It’s part of an effort to consolidate many of the 70 or so poison control centers around the country. Ultimately, they will all be reached by a single toll-free number that directs callers to the center that handles their region, said Anthony Tomassoni, a toxicologist and emergency room physician who is the director of the new Northern New England Poison Center in Portland, Maine.

The goal is to “preserve all the things that are good about our current system, like local knowledge … and be cost-effective,” he said.

“Instead of having two centers serving a population of 2 million, we’ve got one solid center serving a population of 2 million,” he said. “We’ll have certified specialists; we’ll be able to provide medical toxicology and pharmacy backup that was never provided before.”

Centers connected to the new toll-free number will be certified by the poison control centers’ trade group, and staff will have to pass an exam, Tomassoni said.

Poison control centers started springing up in the 1950s. There has never been a national standard for what information the centers could provide, or when they could provide it, Tomassoni said.

“At one point there were over 700 in the country,” he said. “A lot of them were just telephones in the back of emergency departments; whoever was wandering by would just pick up the call. The quality of information varied greatly.”

Together, the centers across the country handle about 2 million calls a year. Vermont’s poison hot line, answered at Fletcher Allen Health Care, gets about 8,000 calls a year; the line in Maine, answered at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, gets about 25,000 calls.

Some are from parents whose child has just eaten something that might be dangerous, like medication meant for somebody else, a cleaning product, or a houseplant. Some are from adults who accidentally ingested a substance such as antifreeze that was stored in the wrong container. And some are from physicians with a patient who has more than one drug prescription, asking about drug interactions.

Those questions can be very difficult to answer, even for many physicians, said Tomassoni.

“[Toxicology] is still a new science, and the quality of information that’s out there is very variable,” he said.

“It’s a very specialized body of knowledge,” he added. “The kind of tidbits we know in toxicology are things that you either know them, or you don’t.”

It costs close to $1 million a year to run a poison control center that serves 2 million people – about the population of Vermont and Maine combined.

But Tomassoni said every dollar spent on the poison centers saves $7 in associated health care costs. The investment pays off when people use the hot line instead of going to the emergency room, calling an ambulance that turns out to be unneeded, or deciding to forego advice and suffering health problems later.

“Through prevention and up-to-date treatment, and through medical education, we find that we’re really a very cost-effective service,” he said.

It’s unclear when the new system will be up and running. Calls to the Vermont number are still answered at Fletcher Allen Health Care.

New Hampshire’s poison control center, based at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, opted not to join Maine and Vermont, Tomassoni said.