Canadian app helps decision-making for resuscitation

MONTREAL – An app designed by clinicians at Charles-Lemoyne hospital is now improving patient care in Canada and in 28 other countries. The EZResus app, created by emergency physician Frédéric Lemaire (pictured) and a team of clinicians, helps doctors deal with the critical first hour of resuscitation when there’s little room for error.

As the EZResus website puts it, the app gives you everything you need to know to take care of your crashing patient in three clicks. EZRESUS:: Your ultimate support to save lives The app applies to adult, pediatric, and neonatal care.

It offers drug dosing information about 170 medications relevant to resuscitation, and helps to eliminate mental calculations. It also provides coaching on equipment, from chest tube size in kids to endotracheal tube depth.

The innovative technology is on the brink of saving lives beyond the planet Earth, too, as a finalist in the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge. It’s a competition to find technologies that can improve patient care in remote areas and during deep-space missions.

“It’s super tough in the heat of the moment to make absolutely no mistakes,” Lemaire told Global News.

With EzResus, health practitioners no longer have to consult books or the internet and then make complicated calculations many times over on a piece of paper.

The app has all the tools needed to figure out appropriate emergency treatment for patients in the same place.

“We’re talking about drug dosing, equipment selection, some checklists for procedures, just to offload our brains so we can focus on the patient,” Lemaire said.

The app is a non-profit venture. Charles-Lemoyne hospital foundation helped set it up by providing initial funding.

“My first impression came in one word: wow,” said Nathalie Boudreau, the foundation’s president and executive director. “It was absolutely amazing to see such a young doctor to come up with a project so original, so different.”

A team of volunteers has been working to input all the necessary information – from nurses to pharmacists and emergency doctors like Jean-François Couture.

“It’s really just a great tool that helps the whole team and really rapidly you can have reliable calculations,” Couture said.

There are now nearly 5,000 users in 29 different countries around the world, and if it were to win the competition, the app has the chance of improving care beyond the confines of planet Earth.

“It’s super, super exciting,” said Lemaire. “We get funding, then we get a chance to collaborate with the Canadian Space Agency, so it would give us the money and the leverage to make this dream happen, distribute the app as broadly as possible and maybe some day help an astronaut on the road to Mars.”