Clinicians now have a new weapon in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.
The UNMC Infectious Diseases Division in the Department of Internal Medicine has created a mobile app that puts the university’s clinical guidelines, protocols and dosing adjustments for antimicrobial use into a clinician’s hands.
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Trevor VanSchooneveld, M.D. |
“Rather than having to go on the internet and find a website, which is not optimized for device viewing, this optimizes it for the smaller devices,” he said. “It also allows clinicians to view the data offline.”
The department worked with Agile MD, a platform for creating, organizing, and distributing clinical knowledge.
The app is available free of charge.
“People are using devices to access so much more data,” Dr. VanSchooneveld. “It used to be everybody went to the computer to access data. As everything moved onto handheld devices and tablets, people want an even easier, more convenient way to access the data.”
Besides being able to pull up information right at a patient’s bedside, the app allows for easier updating, especially compared to a traditional pocket manual.
“With this app, when we update what’s on the Internet, we can just push that out on the app at the same time,” he said.
Part of the goal of the department, said Dr. VanSchooneveld, is to put tools in the hands of clinicians to help them better use antimicrobials, in such a way as to decrease antimicrobial resistance and improve patient outcomes.
“This is the tool,” he said. “We’d like to continue to add more things to it as time goes on, but for right now, we’ve put our most common clinical pathways, dosing schemes and things like that on there, the things that we think people use the most.”
For information on logging in and downloading the app, see sidebar at right. The app is keyed to the email addresses from the clinical enterprise.