Kansas City,
05
July
2022
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08:46 AM
America/Chicago

HealthLeaders: Digital CDS Resource Gives Healthcare Providers On-Demand Support for Pediatric Care

PedsGuide app

by Eric Wicklund

One of the benefits of digital health is that it allows healthcare providers to collaborate and share their expertise with others who don't have that background. Children's Mercy Kansas City is following that path with a new mHealth app designed to give providers a clinical decision support tool for pediatric care.

"Many ERs see children because they have to," says Brandan Kennedy, MD, a pediatric hospitalist and clinical informaticist and associate director of inpatient health informatics at the Kansas City, Missouri-based hospital. "Less than 10% of their ER traffic is kids, so it's not their comfort zone … but that doesn't mean they can’t treat them."

To address that concern, Kennedy and his colleagues created PedsGuide, an app that gives users on-demand clinical decision support (CDS) resources for a wide range (and growing) of pediatric care concerns, from burn treatment to diabetic ketoacidosis. The free app can be accessed via desktop, laptop or mobile device, and even includes a quick-call feature to connect with emergency medicine physicians or the Children's Mercy medical transport team.

Sallie Guezuraga, who manages the Innovations Center at Children's Mercy's Center for Pediatric Innovation, says ER physicians first came up with the idea to develop a resource that would help frontline care works in emergency situations. They soon realized the information they wanted to include was changing often, thanks to new research and innovations. The onset of the pandemic added to the volumes of information—and the urgency to get that information out there.

"We couldn't update it quickly enough," she says. "We had to digitize it."

Armed with a research grant, the Innovations Center team created a simple mHealth app designed to help clinicians in treating children under 3 years old who presented with a fever. From there, they created new modules for infant care, then asthma treatment, then resuscitation workflows. The topics and ideas just kept coming in.

 

Read the full article via HealthLeaders

Children's Mercy Center for Pediatric Innovation