The First Five Minutes, is a new potentially life-saving mobile application to help save children. The new app developed by UW-Milwaukee’s App Brewery, the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin serves to help the emergency department physicians and paramedics crucial moments while resuscitating a child.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports
Using the app on a smartphone or tablet, emergency medical personnel can enter the child’s age or weight, click to confirm it, and immediately get an easy-to-read chart with the correct, standardized medication dose. If all that’s known is the child’s age, the medical provider can make a slight adjustment if the child is smaller or larger than average.
The chart includes five categories of information — color-coded for a quick read — that are key to pediatric cardiopulmonary resuscitation: CPR drugs, dysrhythmia drugs, neurobiological drugs, RSI drugs and equipment sizes.
Below the equipment header is a list of items used during CPR, such as a chest tube. The size of chest tube needed depends on the size of the child.
While the app is for a mobile device, it doesn’t require wifi access.
Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin projects the app onto a screen in the resuscitation room so all staff in the room can see the information.
“Seconds can make a difference for really sick kids,” said Amy Drendel, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s who worked with two other pediatric emergency medicine physicians and a pediatric nurse there to brainstorm the app concept.
“Every minute you’re not getting the heart pumping through the body, lack of oxygen to the brain is a problem,” Drendel said. “This is something that just needed the right collaborators to come together.”
The pediatricians involved with the app also are associate professors of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Besides Drendel, the team included pediatricians Danny Thomas and Michael Meyer.
Robyn Saxe, a pediatric nurse and former flight nurse, was the fourth team member. The Medical College of Wisconsin provided funding.
For more on this technology, visit Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
