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Ivor Kovic M.D. Posts

Can tablets replace AED trainers?

Published October 16, 2016

Ivor Medical AED trainer
Automated external defibrillator (AED) training is essential to any cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) course. Because AEDs save lives. Instructors use AED trainers to teach defibrillator use during courses. AED trainers are dummy versions of the real AED. One of the main problems is that they are quite expensive. They are not helping to lower the barriers of AED training dissemination. And we need these skills to spread like wild fire.

So can we do something about it? Can we replace these devices with something else? I sure think so. This was one of the reasons I started Ivor Medical in the first place. We have developed a complete AED training solution based on tablets and mobile phones.

Research into tablet AED trainer

Today a research article has been published comparing our solution to traditional AED trainers. It was conducted during CPR courses delivered to medical students. In short, it has shown that our cost effective solution can be successfully used during CPR courses as an alternative to traditional AED trainers.

Please read the full article at open source journal Signa Vitae.

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Twitterverse of Emergency Physicians – Infographic

Published January 11, 2016

After several weeks of work analysing Twitter network of 2.234 Emergency Physicians, I bring you Twitterverse of Emergency Physicians Infographic. It summarises results of my
in-depth analysis. More results can be found on TwittER ResearchER.
Twitterverse of Emergency Physicians Infographic

Download pdf version of this infographic (3.5MB).

Copy and paste this code to embed infographic into your website:

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Prescribe an app for your anxious patientprescription

Prescribe an app for your anxious patient

Published December 14, 2015

You know the story well.
A young, otherwise fit and healthy, patient complaining of non specific chest pain, shortness of breath and/or palpitations. Maybe this is their first presentation to your emergency department, or maybe they came to see you many times before. Maybe they already saw their family doctor, and maybe they had some further work up and were even put on some medication.

So, here they are. They go thru triage and have an ECG. And you know that this is not some weird and rare cardiac case. You know this is anxiety. Depending on how busy and stressed you are, you might approach them in various ways. Maybe you’ll even brush them off, because you don’t have time for non life threatening nonsense. “Your ECG is OK, you can go now, and see your family doctor if you have any further problems.”

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Has Amazon figured out how to deliver AEDs?

Published November 30, 2015

Recently I wrote about the necessity to have AEDs (automated external defibrillators) everywhere, if we were to save more cardiac arrest victims. I argued that these devices need to be, and in my view can be, much cheaper than they’re now. I mean just look at this new Raspberry Pi Zero computer that costs only 5 USD!

Another approach is to deliver AEDs quickly to the scene of cardiac arrest. It has been proposed to deliver them by air via drones. There are currently many obstacles to this approach, including aircraft, airspace and cardiac arrest factors. Well, Amazon has, for all the different reasons, been very aggressively tackling the aircraft factors. Amazon sells goods and delivers them. And they are no longer satisfied, because we the costumers are not satisfied, to deliver them the next day. They/we want them delivered in a matter of hours. Their solution are again drones and their new delivery service called Amazon Prime Air. Amazon has been well aware of the shortcomings of existing drones, and since they surely have money to invest + vision and drive, they have been working on their own drones. Their new drone is fully autonomous, can fly for 15 miles at speeds up to 60 mph, and what is a great breakthrough, can fly vertically like octocopter and horizontally like a plane.

Rapid advances in the retail business might ultimately benefit other fields, including saving lives of cardiac arrest victims. Check out Amazon’s entertaining video about their new drone presented by Jeremy Clarkson.

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20 emergency physicians with most followers on TwitterEM docs on Twitter

20 emergency physicians with most followers on Twitter

Published November 23, 2015

I have been systematically following emergency physicians on Twitter for more than 3 years now thru my TwittER project. It all started in 2012 when I analysed around 600 Twitter account by emergency physicians. This report has been published in EMJ – Analysis of emergency physicians’ Twitter accounts.

Since 2012 I have added many more emergency physicians to the list, and I am currently following almost 1500. I believe this to be the biggest curated list of emergency physicians on Planet Earth.

Here are the top 20 emergency physicians with most followers on Twitter and some stats about their accounts. Tables and graphs are interactive. For example your can sort data in tables by clicking on header descriptions.

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