Download, bookmark, aggregate, follow & create for a happy new year!

The holidays are over and with it 2015 is coming to a close. One of the missions of the EMBER Project is to help you organize your flow of information so that it’s relevant and accessible when you need it. Here are four skills and some tools we’ve come across in 2015 that will help you learn, teach, and grow as a physician and an educator.

Download

ACEP Toxicology Section Antidote App – By American College of Emergency Physicians.

Some information can be stored in the cloud or your hard-drive for leisurely review. When taking care of your critically ill patients there is some information that can’t be left to a Google search. Mobile apps are still useful when you want critical information at your fingertips that is easy to access and trustworthy. The ACEP Antidote app is one of those. and will be on my iPhone in 2016.

Bookmark

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) – Making sense of evidence. 

Industry funded research, profit motive and competing interests that don’t always align with patient or public health interests make critical appraisal of the medical literature  a top priority The developers of this site from Oxford have developed workshops and tools for learning how to critically appraise medical research.

Follow

I use Twitter as my tool to network and to organize the flow of EM relevant news, research, opinion and just plain interesting voices.  Here are a couple of the breakout voices I’ve been following in 2015 and will be watching for in 2016

@AirwayNauts By Jim DuCanto & Friends.

Those involved in the solemn deliberate study and practice of navigating, sailing, exploring, and innovating airway management are known as “AirwayNatics”.

@brennafarmer1 One of my smartest friends; wears more hats well than anyone I know.

Medication Safety, Patient Safety, Emergency Medicine, Toxicology expert.

@jameshorowitzmd  Jim is my go to guy for advanced VTE care in sick patients. I expect many great insights from him in 2016

Cardiac Critical Care. Co-Director Pulmonary Embolism Advanced Care team #PEAC

If you want to see the complete list of who I follow on Twitter in Emergency Medicine here it is. Feel free to pick and choose for a great stream of information. Then add it to one of the apps below!

Aggregate

News aggregators like Feedly help you collect, follow and share the many streams of information into one place, and are your lifeline for keeping track of it all.  Here are the one’s I liked most in 2015 and will continue to use in 2016.

Flipboard aggregates articles, video, podcasts, and social media into a beautiful and mobile, print-style digital magazine. With it’s browser widget and other tools it makes collecting and sharing news  easy. In addition it allows you to create and curate your own magazines with multiple editors if you.  By far my favorite aggregator.

The one thing Flipboard doesn’t do is allow for collecting for offline reading. For this I use Pocket. A great tool if what you are looking to do is “clip” an article, video, or other content for later.

Create

In 2015 I hosted an innovation in medical education Design Challenge where I encouraged our residents and many of my expert colleagues to free their lectures from their hard-drives, and find easy and creative ways to translate their knowledge from powerpoint slides into more accessible and visually appealing alternatives.

One of my favorite tools of 2015 was Haiku Deck, it’s a wonderful alternative to Powerpoint.  Here are a few decks I made in 2015. I’m sure I’ll be making more in 2016.

That’s it for us at the EMBER Project this year. Happy New Year!!