IPSWICH, Mass. — November 7, 2013 —Health professionals in multiple impoverished countries in Asia and Africa have access to the latest evidence-based, pediatric clinical information because of innovative work being done by KidsCareEverywhere. According to a recent study in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, access to that information helps healthcare professionals manage care in low-income countries.
EBSCO Health donates the clinical point-of-care resource PEMSoft, the definitive resource for evidence-based, pediatric clinical information at the point-of-care, to KidsCareEverywhere. The California nonprofit then trains the doctors and nurses on how to use the software to provide better health care to children in public hospitals and clinics.
Currently, KidsCareEverywhere supports doctors and hospitals in 15 different countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Yemen, South Africa, Morocco, Namibia, Senegal, and Vanuatu. Doctors learn English as part of medical training worldwide, and are able to use PEMSoft because almost every doctor, even in the most impoverished countries, has a smart phone to download the PEMSoft mobile app so access to the internet or electricity is not necessary.
PEMSoft has been shown to be a key practice resource, even for those who only receive a 45 minute training session and are non-primary English speakers. In a study published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (14(5) 471-476), September 2013, the use of the desktop version of PEMSoft was associated with a dramatic 81 percent increase in the ability of Vietnamese physicians to correctly manage common clinical pediatric emergency medicine cases.
KidsCareEverywhere Founder and Executive Director, Ronald Dieckmann MD, MPH believes that access to PEMSoft is vitally important for the hospitals that KidsCareEverywhere is helping. “We help doctors help kids everywhere. Very few of our site health professionals have any medical textbooks or medical references at all to help make critical medical decisions at the bedside. Ironically, almost all of them have access to computers and smart phones, but they have no medical software.”
During a recent trip to Ethiopia and Tanzania, KidsCareEverywhere trained nearly 200 physicians, residents and medical students at national facilities on the benefits of using PEMSoft in their daily practice. At the Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where half of the country’s pediatricians and all of its emergency physicians are trained, PEMSoft quickly became the most frequently used reference tool by pediatric residents, and is now used routinely to guide treatment of the most severe and complex cases.
KidsCareEverywhere is looking to expand its sustainable medicine outreach program at the National Hospital for Pediatrics in Hanoi, Vietnam in early 2014. The outreach will include donation of the new mobile PEMSoft application called "PEMSoft Mobile" for smart phones and tablet PCs and on-site instruction by the KidsCareEverywhere team. This project will test the feasibility of the mobile app in a large, controlled clinical trial.
In June 2014, KidsCareEverywhere will be partnering with the Timmy Foundation from Indianapolis to train health professionals in software utilization in the Amazon basin in Ecuador—where there is no internet access or reliable electricity. Because the PEMSoft Portable mobile app resides on the native memory of the smart phone or tablet PC, the lack of internet access at the point of care will not limit utilization, even in this remote location.
Dr. Dieckmann, who is also EBSCO’s managing Editor-in-Chief of PEMSoft, is encouraged by the many successes he has seen so far. “I am inspired by the transformations we have witnessed already after the work that we do to bring remote colleagues into 21st century medicine.”
PEMSoft is licensed commercially to hundreds of American, Canadian, Australian and other Western hospitals by EBSCO Information Services, who owns the software. To learn more about the work KidsCareEverywhere is doing, visit www.kidscareeverywhere.org. For more information on PEMSoft, visit www.pemsoft.com.
About EBSCO Health
EBSCO Health, part of EBSCO Information Services, is a leading provider of clinical decision support solutions, healthcare business intelligence, and medical research information for the healthcare industry. EBSCO Health users include professionals in medicine, nursing, and allied health. Flagship products include CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Nursing Reference Center™, clinical e-books and e-journals, EBSCO Discovery Service™, licensed databases (such as MEDLINE®), plus EBSCONET®. EBSCO databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the electronic resource favored by libraries around the world.
About EBSCO Information Services
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 375 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical librarians, social workers, hospital administrators, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Nursing Reference Center™, Patient Education Reference Center™, Rehabilitation Reference Center™, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source™ andSocINDEX™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE®, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO website at: www.ebsco.com.
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