Any clinician who has ever had to take care of a child in a life-threatening emergency
knows how stressful the situation can be. If it’s not something you do every day, in the
moment, you may not remember the protocol for pediatric advanced life support,
dosing for medications, or even who to call for help. That’s why Children’s Mercy has
developed the PedsGuide App. PedsGuide serves as the home for multiple evidence-
based pediatric clinical modules created at Children’s Mercy. The first two modules
launched were Febrile Infant and Asthma. The Resuscitation module is the third, just
released in 2021. “The mission for PedsGuide is to provide an easy-to-use, palm-in
your-hand, rapid access tool that gives you clinical decision support for specific
pediatric conditions in an evidence-based fashion. These tools can help clinicians make
better decisions on the front lines, which then can improve a child’s outcome in their
downstream care,” said Brandan Kennedy, MD, Medical Director of the PedsGuide App.
While developing PedsGuide, the Center for Pediatric Innovation at Children’s Mercy,
addressed challenges including, integrating a multidisciplinary team, optimizing user
experiences, funding, and completing the value stream to launch an app in the app
stores. The Innovation Center built a team that included multiple physicians, nurses,
pharmacists, human factor scientists, simulation lab specialists, evidence-based
practice leadership, and transport team members. To solve for these challenges, the
human factor scientists reviewed and improved user flows as well as field tested the
app with EMS providers to ensure it was optimized to decrease cognitive load.
Additionally, Children’s Mercy’s philanthropy team secured multiple grant funding
sources, and the team proposed sustainability models that would allow the app to
remain free for the end user. The Innovation Center also engaged and managed an
outside app development firm to build out the app that transformed the clinical
expertise into the app experience that is in both android and apple app stores today.
Since inception in 2017, there are over 58,000 downloads of the PedsGuide app with
multiple publications of improved outcomes in collaboration the AAP (American
Academy of Pediatrics). The team has heard positive feedback from community
providers who highly value having PedsGuide at their fingertips, and we are getting
stories of how the app changed clinical care to be aligned with these up to date clinical
guidelines. Plans include launching additional modules for Diabetes, BRUE (Brief
Resolved Unexplained Event), and Antibiotic protocols. We will measure success by the
Mission impact (number of downloads, lives impacted, qualitative stories of outcomes,
outcome measures), Reputation (Children’s Mercy equity as a leader in pediatric
medicine, publications, conference presentations), and Sustainability (ability to continue
to attract grant and philanthropic funding, and potential revenue generation
sustainability options with other children’s hospitals).
Click here to view a quick demo of the PedsGuide App.