By Judson Barber, MD
This month’s technology feature focuses on an app that helps you remember key steps during emergency situations that may arise in pediatric procedural sedation and anesthesia. “Pedi Crisis 2.0” is an app that was developed by the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA) aimed at anesthesia providers (MDAs and CRNA) but it is useful as well for procedural sedation providers that do not use inhalational agents.
The app is organized as a list of emergency conditions encountered in anesthesia and sedation (i.e. anaphylaxis, bronchospasm, difficult airway). After you choose a problem, a screen appears that lists features of the condition (to help verify the diagnosis) and potential causes. There is a differential diagnosis tab with links to those diagnoses. Once you are sure of your diagnosis, click on the treatment tab. Now a list of treatment recommendations appears including drugs and their doses. You can in put an individual patient's weight to get specific doses. There is also a drugs tab that lists only the medications. Finally, there is a crisis tab for patients that are in extremis or rapidly deteriorating.
The app also includes a phone numbers tab that is accessible from any screen in the app. This allows you to store emergency phone number such as the code team, pharmacy, PICU or any other number you may need in crisis. It also allows you to make these phone numbers a hypertext link for rapid dialing. The app allows minimal customization including making text larger and darker.
Pedi Crisis 2.0 is free to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play. There is no desktop version of this app.
