Pediatric Emergency Drug Calculator: Great Idea, Not Ready For Prime Time
Pediatric Emergency Drugs is designed to be a quick med list calculator for pediatric emergencies. For folks who deal with pediatric emergencies have the challenge of not only determining the proper drugs to use, but also to get the dosage right by age.
At the first page you are met with a screen to enter the age of the child and either allow the program to pick the estimated weight or put your own weight in. This is a nice feature as often in pediatric emergencies patients arrive through the door needing immediate care and a weight is unavailable. The estimated weight it appears to pick is the 50% for a boy of the selected age. Allowing you to pick the gender of the child would be helpful in narrowing down the weight a little further since girls of a given age would weigh a little less. Another option would be to allow the use of Broselow colors. These days the standard for most ERs is the Broselow tape which is a plastic foldable tape that doses based on length.
Once you select your patient you have a section of drugs broken down into: cardiac arrest meds, infusions, and bolus drugs. The cardiac arrest meds are short a few drugs. There are no drugs for treating ventricular fibrillation (amiodarone) and they do not make mention of the dose of electricity for synchronized cardioversion (only for defibrillation). The infusion list assumes you are mixing all drugs in 50mL bags which is not usually the case. (we usually use 100 or 250mL bags for drips). Also, in America thanks to JCAHO regs medicated infusions need to be have standardized concentrations and not use the “rule of 6” employed by this program. The list of bolus drugs is missing a few key drugs as well such as midazolam and hydrocortisone for sepsis. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
