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My Favorite Apps for Paramedics

Jun 08, 2021
Hi guys, my name is Sam and welcome to Pragmatic. In this week's video, we are discussing the

apps

I use at work as a paramedic. I'm sure there are some boomer doctors here who will disagree with me and that's completely fine, but I think

apps

and smartphones are almost a necessity in ems nowadays, we have so many different drug drip calculation references that we should have at our fingertips, having those old school flip books really aren't that efficient and they're not the way I think we're going in medicine and ems specifically, so in this week's video, I'm going to go over the apps that I use regularly and I'll talk about some of the things I like and don't like about the apps.
my favorite apps for paramedics
I'm not sponsored by any of these guys, none of these guys reached out to me and asked me to review their stuff and I'm not even reviewing the apps, I'm just talking about them and showing you their usefulness and how I use them on a regular basis, it's okay, so getting into the video, I don't really have these apps in any particular order. I moved them off the home page of my phone so you don't have to look at all the other apps I use in my daily life. We are being completely honest. I'm probably on my Instagram more than any of these while I'm at work, but that's neither here nor there, getting into the medical apps themselves.
my favorite apps for paramedics

More Interesting Facts About,

my favorite apps for paramedics...

The first application on this page. I have my helicopter protocol app. This is an app that is built off of the ppp app and you basically submit your protocols and they will help you format them all into a sort of cohesive state that allows you to very easily update all of your information here, so if we are constantly making changes to your protocols, it's really easy to distribute them to everyone and then you don't have like protocol pamphlets lying around in your ambulance that are outdated and could lead to medical error, so here we have basically General type of app categories at the top, you have procedures administrative, respiratory protocols.
my favorite apps for paramedics
The nice thing here is that if I know I'm going to get a respiratory call there, I can access that and now I have all my respiratory protocols right there. Then we enter the wheezing of an adult and the protocol appears. I can expand everything at that time. What's really cool is the hyperlink, so it doesn't provide the doses because we don't want to have to update the doses in every protocol that a medication resides in, so here I can come if I don't remember what the dosage is for solumerol or methylprednisone, I can Click to link me to the page that actually has that medication and I can obtain my indications, contraindications, adverse reactions, doses. special considerations with the medication, all here on one page, so that's great and then I can hit back, go right back to the protocol, let's say I can go to magsulfate and then look at that protocol as well, like I said, this is kind of A branch of the ppp app there and they basically help you as a service put all your protocols into this format and then for a monthly fee you can maintain it and they come to the next app.
my favorite apps for paramedics
This is exactly the same. for the ground ambulance it looks exactly the same. This is another protocol application and not all of these applications will depend on the type of service. Some of them will also be wider so you can use them. This is literally what I use. regularly the other app that you will see in the top right corner is active 911, this is how we receive our tones and pages for the special ops team I work on, they send a word that unmute your phone, play a sound and tell you it's really scary when you're sleeping, so moving down to the second row of applications, these are a little bit more applicable to you and not necessarily to your service, so these are just reference materials that I use and the first one. on that list is essential, which is a really great application.
I don't use it for everything on this app just because it gets a little cluttered, it gets a little hard to navigate in really stressful situations, but if you spend some time with this app and really enter your specific dosages and some of its protocol stuff it can be a very useful app so here we have a bunch of different um categories within the app which is really cool so you can see some of these here you know a lot of this I use it as material for reference after the fact, if I want to look something up or if I hear something and I'm not sure or if I just want to do some light reading. on a topic, this has a lot of condensed information, for example, how to go to the airway, go to intubation and it literally gives you step by step instructions for intubation and some different techniques, image positioning, all of that obviously not it's good if you're in the moment, but for light reading, some continuing education for yourself, it's a great resource.
The other things here, I think are a little more useful. Some of the stuff right now, you can go to cardiac, you can see some of the acls updates for this year and then you can go to all these different rhythms, which is really cool if you're not very familiar with cardiac rhythms or just you want to reference something, you can scroll down and press hey third degree av block and It's going to plot the third degree on each block here to give you an example of what it looks like and it's also going to give you all the parameters of this beat, it's going to talk a little bit about It and then it will also give you some general treatment guidelines, obviously the treatment guidelines here are not specific to their protocols, so it's a little bit dangerous.
You never want to receive treatment outside of the app. You should make sure you follow your own guidelines, unless you are a doctor. You are under your own license and can do whatever you want in that case, as long as it is in line with national standards. Here you have clinical pharmacology, so here are the main critical care medications that we use, so if you get to any of these, we can go to atenolol and it will tell you all kinds of things: mechanism of action, absorption, just some information Regarding this, indications, once again, not their protocols, but the contraindications of the application that you can generally follow in the application. they're pretty accurate and that's for a lot of these medications and then you can look up medications if you need to get to something really quick, going down a little bit more or actually, I guess going back a little bit the clinical calculators is great, but there's a lot of them not I use this because there are too many different calculators within this, like the shock index, which we used for a long time in the helicopter, I can come here and I can say, hey, your heart rate is 100, your blood systolic.
The pressure is 90. And we can calculate that I have a shock index of 1.1. It also gives you a similar interpretation, so you should probably know how to interpret these numbers if you enter them, but if you need a refresher to let you know it's great that we're going down, we have trickle down calculations and that's also in the quick tabs on the bottom of this app, so I can go to drips, let's say we're going to do an epinephrine drip. We can come here, press that and then we can see the indications for the drug classes, uh, things to know about it, but the calculator is great, so here I can configure in this category of applications, I can configure what is our concentration. of epinephrine drops, so here we use eight, so I can come in here and hit eight milligrams in a 250 ml bag, it updates the concentration and then it gives me what I have per milliliter in the bag and then down here I have a slide. scale for what my dose is, so if I want one microgram per minute, it's going to go or sorry, two micrograms per minute, it's going to say this little moving thing that you see is the drip rate and it should be 3.8 ml per hour. , which is quite a bit. great, that's an easy way to set up a pump, our pumps do our medication calculations for us, but sometimes we have to confirm those doses or confirm another facility's dose and this is a great and easy way to do it, so it's great.
Back to the home page, although what I use this app the most will be our lab values, so here you reach your lab values. I'm not very familiar with lab studies, just because I'm a paramedic, we don't really go. We talk about that a lot in school, but in an intensive care transport unit we do a lot with these, so if I need a refresher on what a normal coagulant is, we can come in here and scroll down and it will give us our normal suppositories for everything or you can look at your cardiac enzymes and each one of them, you can press them and it will give you a different type of explanation about that specific lab value.
It's really cool, there are other things you know, balloon pumps, it can show you some of the waveforms there, if you're not familiar, you don't do a lot of obstetric stuff, hemodynamics, those are basically different types of hemodynamic windows that you're looking at depending on if you have a swan or if you are just getting information. and then you have some pictures and procedures here. I'm going to back up for a second and look at some of the other things, but this will help you interpret things, some fan management that I really don't like very much. it just gives you some information there, but one of the things that I use a lot on this is the rsi page, so there's the quick tab at the bottom, so let's make a call.
One of the first things we do is start to figure out what our rsi medications, if things get worse, if the call sounds like it's going to end that way and for those of you who don't know, rsi is a rapid sequence intubation that basically consists in paralyzing and sedating a patient and placing a breathing tube down the patient's throat. There are a lot of different medications that we use for this and they are all based on weight, so here I can come in and say we have a 100 kilogram male patient, we get him in and then he will give me all my different medications, so pretreatment. induction agents and then my paralytics at the bottom and he gives me the dosage of them, he will tell me how many ml I am potentially removing and gives me a lot of information.
The really cool thing about this is that this will actually allow I have to go in here and set up the different medications and their concentrations that I have in my truck so that it's not just a random interpretation of them. If I look at this and for my induction, my ketamine dose is yes, let's say two. I can go in here and I can say, hey, my maximum dose is not actually 1.5, it's two milligrams per kilogram and then that will be added to the calculation, which is really interesting and then you can update the parameters in the app and that's it.
Okay, so it's a cool app, but it's relatively clunky, packed with so much stuff when you're stressed, it's hard to scroll through all those different options and find exactly what you need. All these applications require. practice before you find yourself in that situation so the next application on this list is your iv calculation and this is how I usually do my iv drip calculations if I don't have my particular pump or if I'm just trying to set something up very quickly without go through all the menus of that thing, so here I can go to the top.
I always have a pump, but if you're on a land truck and you're trying to do gravity tubing, you can switch it to gravity. I am using a pump and my dose will be micrograms per kilogram per minute. You know, that's the scariest dosing schedule you're going to get in paramedic school and my dose for this is going to be five micrograms per kilogram per minute. The patient weighs 100 kilograms. The total dose in the solution will be, let's say, 16 milligrams and 250 ml and then I can go down here and calculate it and that will give me the ml per hour, which is what most pumps are like. configured to deliver the drip rate, you can resort to gravity, do the same, it gives me the mls per hour, but it also gives me the drops per minute and the drops per 15 seconds, if you're really counting them, I hope so.
It's not because it's very old school, it also has your push calculations, you should be able to do it in your head, but if you're just really stressed you need something to jog your memory that works too, which is great, so this is a one of my

favorite

apps and to be completely honest the easiest thing to do, just an easy app that removes that cognitive load, we're not sitting around doing the calculations written on paper every time, contrary to what your paramedic instructor says. What we do in the field, the next application in line is Hippocrates.
I don't use this a lot, but it's a great medication reference if the patient says, "Hey, I'm taking doxie acetyl anhydrase, blah, blah, and you're like, yeah." I totally know what that is, yes, totally no. I'm going to grab a texture here real quick. You can go here and search for that medication and find all the information it contains. If you come to drugs, let's say we're looking. in the profile we can go topropofol and then it will give me a bunch of different information, so the general adult dosage will give me contraindications, precautions, adverse reactions, drug interactions, which is kind of interesting and useful, just to make sure you're not. giving something harmful but generally useful what i use this app for mainly however it is identification of your pill so it happens a lot in ems you come out with a dosage unknown to someone and they tell you i don't know what they took this pill. and they give you a pill and now you have to find out what that is.
Here you can look for what is printed on the first side and what is printed on the second side if you have similar numbers or letters. You go in here, you can select the shape, we will say it is a six-pill, we will say it is any color and then if there is any score you can go to matches and it will show you a picture of that pill. Well it's not, it's not charging right now, which is one of the dangers of any electronic device, but it should show you a picture of that pill and then it tells you a lot about it, so it's an easy way to identify medications.
It's not 100, but it works. most of the time and I have found it really useful. I have a bunch of different things here that I don't use including another medication calculator but again it's a little messy for me so next here for calculations I want I use md calc so md calc is an app really simple that basically stores every medical calculation known to man, so you can come here and see them all and it gives you all these different mathematical equations. which you can enter and calculate in this app, so whatever you do, I guarantee this app has it, but you can save your

favorite

s for the things you actually use, so I have my anion gap calculator Apgar score that you have never I can remember. during my life as a paramedic for some reason cpop pain score titled tidal depth and volume calculator glasgow coma scale ideal body weight and adjusted body weight i use this all the time so you can come in here say it's a man we are I'm going to say that are 55 inches and then we can calculate that does it right away, so for this patient this patient weighs 110 pounds for an ideal body weight and you can give him different advice and things like that. good app, the other thing i use a lot is the nih stroke scale for this one.
I don't do this enough to really feel comfortable doing this on patients, but it's expected so I just have it there. Plus, it's a great app for all your other calculations besides medication dosing. It works for dosing medications. I just don't use it there. Second line. Very disappointing. Your calculator. I use it all the time because sometimes it's easier. calculate your ideal body weight here, I'm saying, oh, okay, so, you know, for a 50-year-old man plus 2.3 um kilograms for every inch over five feet and they, you know, six feet, so They are 12 inches, so 12 times. 2.3 plus 50 and you can get your ideal body weight very easily here, so you should know a lot of these calculations in your head and be able to write them down.
However, I do not do mental calculations to know the formula. on the calculator and that's it, next we have the erg. This is the orange book I used to carry in the ambulance. It is much easier to have this application. I can come in here. I can search by image if I want to say. like hey, I see this sign, I have all the information there or I can search by what the car looks like, hit the car, it seems to tell me what the potential dangers are, you know, highway trailers, all that. Really great easy to use app, you can also search by name or by number, so don't use the book, use this, it updates itself, you don't have to get new ones and then it doesn't take up any space or weight on your manipulate the stroke scale , I don't really use this, it just has a bunch of different stroke scales, if you want to use something else, like fix a big stroke scale, you can check this, say, hey, they're alert, they're abnormal. abnormal normal none we're just finishing this up to show you the ending it basically walks you through the score and we get to the end and it says it's probably a large vessel occlusive stroke so it's an lvo alert and then you can send this for someone, your supervisor or you know, say: hey, look, uh, my friend is having a stroke, check out this stroke, it sucks, so the next line of apps here are not things I'm using on calls, They are more reference material, so up.
Here we have the medicine app implemented, which is basically the app I'm using to do baseline stuff for the tactical combat casualty care committee. You can go in here and see what the current Triple C guidelines are. I can see this, it's all free which is great and you can ask, hey, what are the teachings on breathing breathing and it gives you very quick bullet points on what you should search and do in that transition of attention. These things are really cool. You also have a diary that you can see here. If you want to see what the latest science says, what different studies are being done, you can go here and it will give you a list of interesting references. to do your own research from credible sources uh you have a canine master you'll see damage control resuscitation covid management recommendations um a lot of really interesting things uh in this app it's just not something that's like a reference to use right away uh in my experience uh The next application here I will not open because it contains all my personal information.
The nremt app. If you are registered nationally, you do not have this application. You have to fix it yourself because when are you going to continue. The interesting thing is that you can enter this application, you can take it when they pass the list to you, you can sign your name, take a photo of it within this application, upload it in your ce requirements for investigation and you can enter a quick information. and you don't have to scramble at the end of your two-year renewal cycle to try to get all of this into the national registry database;
You can stay up to date in real time while you are in class. I highly recommend it. Next you have a flight radar, so this here will basically give you all the planes in the area, so obviously I use this on the helicopter, it's not something that many EMS agencies really need, but this gives you all kinds of information so if you come down here we can click like a plane tells me what's where all of that goes um it's just you can check where your helicopter is if you send one to see where they're going and then you can follow the planes really cool for us. , if I show up for work, the helicopter is no longer there.
I wonder where it is. I can open it up and see exactly where they are last but not least here and this is something I've never used on a real call, but I was introduced to it during the extended austere provider class. This is a pain rescue app and it is something that is very useful for tactical medics who have to do medical threat assessments. If we open it, we can access the medical threat assessments and then each of these pages. It basically allows you to fill out different things that are important to an application, they're things that should generate things in your memory like, oh yeah, I didn't think of that, you know you have different operational information and you don't have to fill out everything on the fly, everything that you have when you're done, you can go down here and generate a pdf that I can then send to all the other people in this operation and it gives me basically the medical plan for the incident. really easy to distribute without paper copies, of things, you can also set up profiles, so if I want to set it up, these are my main hospitals in this area, this will always be the same.
I can set up this profile there, so hey. I'm doing an operation in Loveland. We can configure that we can say that the main hospital is mcr. Now I can save the profile data in this application and then I can reference that at a later time and when I go to the hospital premises I can import. There's a really cool app for tactical medics and the like that need to set up things like that, guys, this list isn't all-inclusive, um, obviously, this doesn't cover everything out there, it's not even one of the best apps for

paramedics

, uh, video, what?
This is just what I actually use on a regular basis if you guys have apps that you think are very useful to you and that you use regularly and that you think I should get or that other people should try because maybe it fits the bill. I encourage you to leave that in the comments below. If you have any questions, let me know and I'll see you next week abroad.

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