I walked through the halls of the 2016 ACEP Scientific Assembly, marveling at both the new and names-you-know companies that are guaranteed to help me gain control of my time, my practice, or my destiny and be a better, more informed physician.
As EM physicians we have to be focused on unearthing just the information necessary to make swift and thorough, often life-saving, decisions regarding a patient’s health and well-being. Responding at the pace necessary to keep up in a busy ER requires us to keep a ton of information in our heads or know where to go at a moment’s notice.
I came across an EM doc at ACEP who clearly understands, and sympathizes, with our need for accurate, useful information to apply in the chaos of the ED.  As a resident at the University of Virginia, Brian Fengler spent a year researching Pulmonary Embolism and publishing a protocol that was relied upon by many. A few years later, Dr Fengler was working in a busy ER and was faced with a woman who had a massive PE…and was 36 weeks pregnant. He knew exactly what to do for the patient but was puzzled as to the risks to the baby. He did what we do, and turned to Dr. Google for a consult. After 10 minutes of digging, he didn’t find anything more than he already had in his head. He took a chance and made a decision to treat the patient aggressively. Fortunately, it was the right move for that patient and her child. But, just as 80% of the decisions we all make in the ER every day, it wasn’t evidence-based. It was an educated guess. Is that the kind of medicine we want to practice?
Fengler didn’t. He never wanted to face the uncertainty he felt that day again. He went about creating a tool that helps docs like us put our fingers on the guidelines and evidence we need, specific to the patient we are seeing, in about 30 seconds. And, he built it to work how we think. I got to see his tool, EvidenceCare, at ACEP and was at once impressed and covetous.  I wanted to be able to use it!
The treatment guide-lines on EvidenceCare been authored by the best in the business… it’s like taking DeBlieux, Kline, or Mattu to work with you. Even better is the way it helps us connect with our patients by translating treatment recommendations into a language and format that makes sense to them…something that is proven to double patient satisfaction.
Furthermore, the treatment pathway you use on EvidenceCare can be imported into your EMR note to show why you made the decision you did!
Over the decades I have become acutely, sometimes painfully, aware that all the information I need to serve my patients isn’t in my head. While I firmly believe that there are things we should memorize, the volume of information we need to use on a daily basis requires that we use various tools to help us.  In fact, a physician friend made the great point that we should be able to access those tools when we take boards, since practice doesn’t occur in a sterile vacuum.  I couldn’t agree more.
So I encourage you to take a look at EvidencCare, for your own personal use or for your facility. Â I’ve been using it and find it simple and elegant. And if you read the blog regularly you know I don’t pitch products very often, so that should tell you something.
EvidenceCare content is free. Â But if you subscribe to EvidenceCare using the discount code LEAP, you get 33% off the premium edition which allows you to accrue CME, offers a shared decision make tool for use with patients, and allows you to paste information into the EMR as I mentioned above.
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this is awesome! As an EMT (and one day hopefully an ER physician) I love seeing tech like this coming into the field – very helpful and easy to use!