MDCalc, synonymous with easy-to-use bedside tools for most emergency physicians, is now doing for guidelines what it’s been doing for medical calculators for over a decade.
Guidelines are notoriously difficult to access—a report from the New England Health Institute (NEHI)[1] cited inconvenience as one of the primary barriers to regular use of guideline recommendations by practicing physicians.
While most guidelines are available online, limited searchability, and the fact that they’re not optimized for digital and mobile devices, makes them difficult for physicians to use at the bedside.
MDCalc’s interactive guideline summaries have a number of key features aimed at optimizing the user experience, including (1) easy navigation, broken down by disease stage and workup options, (2) concise visual icons for strength of recommendation and level of evidence, allowing readers to assess the recommendation statements at a glance, and (3) custom links to the full guideline, taking the user directly to the corresponding content in the guideline.
“MDCalc is already used by most ER docs, so it’s logical to make ACEP’s clinical policies as available and simple to use as their calcs,” said Eric Steinberg, DO, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and lead MDCalc contributor on the guideline summaries.
“We’re excited to be expanding our collaboration with ACEP and making their guidelines more accessible at the bedside,” said Joe Habboushe, MD, MBA, MDCalc co-founder and associate professor of emergency medicine at NYU/Bellevue. “A big part of the reason we as EM docs don’t use clinical guidelines as much as we could is that it’s tricky to find the recommendations for our exact clinical questions, especially when seeing patients, so we’ve tried to solve that problem the MDCalc way.”
The summaries also link directly to MDCalc calcs, when applicable, for easy calculation of relevant scores.
The guideline summaries were developed in collaboration between MDCalc and ACEP’s Clinical Policies Committee.
MDCalc is officially partnered with American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and has developed a beta version of two of ACEP’s Clinical Policies, with more in development and planned for launch in early 2019. Guidelines in other specialties are also available.
A full listing of the guideline summaries is accessible at mdcalc.com/guidelines.
REFERENCES:
[1] Kenefick H, Lee J, Fleishman V. Improving Physician Adherence to Clinical Practice Guidelines: Barriers and Strategies for Change. New England Healthcare Institute. Feb 2008. https://www.nehi.net/writable/publication_files/file/cpg_report_final.pdf