An app designed by a doctor at Charles-Lemoyne Hospital in Montreal is dramatically improving patient care.
Now its revolutionary technology is on the verge of saving lives on Earth and beyond as a finalist in the Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, a competition to find technology that can improve patient care in remote areas and during deep space missions.
The EZResus app, created by emergency physician Frédéric Lemaire, helps doctors manage the critical first hour of resuscitation when there is little room for maneuver or too much error.
“It’s super tough in the heat of the moment to make absolutely no mistakes,” Lemaire said.
With EzResus, doctors no longer have to consult books, the internet and then do complicated calculations many times over on a piece of paper.
The app has all the tools needed to find appropriate emergency care for patients in the same location.
“We talk about drug dosing, equipment selection, some checklists for procedures, just to clear our minds so we can focus on the patient,” Lemaire said.
The app is a non-profit venture. The Charles-Lemoyne Hospital Foundation helped set it up by providing initial funding.
“My first impression came in one word: wow,” said Nathalie Boudreau, the foundation’s president and executive director. “It was absolutely amazing to see such a young doctor come up with a project so original, so different.”
A team of volunteers has been working to input all the necessary information – from nurses, to pharmacists and emergency doctors such as Jean-François Couture.
“It’s really just a great tool that helps the whole team and really quickly you can get reliable calculations,” Couture said.
There are now nearly 5,000 users in 29 different countries around the world, and should it win the competition, the app has the chance to improve healthcare beyond the borders of planet Earth.
“It’s super, super exciting,” Lemaire said. “We get funding, then we get a chance to partner with the Canadian Space Agency, so that would give us the money and the power to realize this dream, distribute the app as widely as possible and maybe one day help an astronaut on the way to Mars.”
It is Dr. Lemaire’s true last frontier.
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