Your EMS disaster team is called in for a mass casualty caused by a building collapse and you are faced with several dozen patients pulled from debris with abdominal tenderness. A few years ago you would have had to rely on vital signs, external exam, and gestalt. Fortunately, today you brought your MobiUS portable ultrasound machine, the world’s first FDA-approved smarthphone-powered ultrasound device.

You are a couple of weeks away from renewing your state medical license and you realize that you are 10 hours short on your CME requirement for the year. How are you going to cram in 10 hours of CME between your hectic schedule at work and home?  This month we’ll take a step away from gadget reviews and explore the many and varied ways you can use the internet to cram the requisite CME into your life.

When emergency physician Harvey Castro asked a nurse to start a dopamine dose for a hypotensive patient one day, he watched the nurse leave the room, find the book that could guide her to the titratable dose, look in the index and then flip through until she found what she needed. Castro wondered, Isn’t there a more efficient way?

This update to the modern classic adds the ability to record, transmit, and simultaneously listen to the full range of frequencies. Is it an unnecessary upgrade, or a telemedicine game-changer?

It’s 3:00 a.m. in the small community hospital where you are moonlighting for the first time. Your thoughts are interrupted by a page from triage informing you that a four-year-old female was just brought in by parents after being struck by a car while riding her bike.

How many patients a day come to you in a C-collar? If your ED is anything like mine, you measure it by the dozen. The Clear Collar by Clear Advantage Collar, Inc. attempts to fill this void. But does it give up too much in the process?

It’s 2 a.m. and you’re seven hours into a 12-hour overnight shift. Your pager announces that EMS is bringing in a 56-year-old woman from home for shortness of breath.  Upon arrival the patient is hypotensive, tachycardic, hypoxic and febrile. Your nurses establish two peripheral IVs and a quick portable CXR confirms your suspicion that she has an extensive left-sided pneumonia.

We all use trauma sheers in the emergency department, and we’re well aware of their shortcomings. This month we are looking at the S-Cut Emergency Cutting Tool, a product that takes a new look at this old problem.

We’ve all heard the saying, “All bleeding stops eventually,” right?  Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something to help stop the bleeding before exsanguination takes care of the problem for us? Direct pressure was the mantra for bleeding control for centuries, and short of a tourniquet there have been no real improvements to this method until just a few years ago. Along came powders and gauze impregnated with hemostatic agents.