An app designed by a doctor at Charles-Lemoyne hospital in Montreal is dramatically improving patient care.
Now, its revolutionary technology is on the brink of saving lives on Earth and beyond as a finalist in the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, a competition to find technologies that can improve patient care in remote areas and during deep-space missions.
The EZResus app, created by emergency physician Frédéric Lemaire, helps doctors deal with the critical first hour of resuscitation when there’s little room for maneuver or for error.
“It’s super tough in the heat of the moment to do absolutely no mistakes,” Lemaire said.
With EzResus, health practitioners no longer have to consult books, the internet and then make complicated calculations many times over on a piece of paper.
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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.”
That’s Dr. Lemaire’s true final frontier.
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