Upgrade of The Difficult Airway App™ to Version 1.5 Now Available

FARMINGTON, Conn.—Airway Management Education Center, provider of The Difficult Airway Course™, has announced the release of version 1.5 of The Difficult Airway App™, a mobile application developed for the iPhone and iPod touch. Version 1.5 of the app is available for purchase on the iTunes App Store; owners of Version 1.02 can upgrade for free.

The Difficult Airway App™ is an essential tool for clinicians who manage emergency airways in any setting: the ED, ICU, in-patient unit or the many EMS practice environments. The Version 1.5 upgrade coincides with the recent release of the 4^th edition of the Manual of Emergency Airway Management by Ron M. Walls, MD and Michael F. Murphy, MD. In the 4^th edition, the authors introduce updated airway algorithms, a new mnemonic for predicting difficult cricothyrotomy and other revisions based on the most current research in the field. “With Version 1.5, The Difficult Airway App™ matches the Manual and reflects the latest thinking in airway management,” says Ron M. Walls, MD, Chairman of Emergency Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Professor, Harvard Medical School. “In addition, we incorporated user feedback to make the App easier to use.”

“The app is unique in four important ways,” says Dr. Walls. “It contains a highly sophisticated, yet simple to use, drug dosing calculator that accounts for obesity and other vital considerations while automatically calculating recommended RSI drugs and doses. It provides decision-support in the form of algorithms and mnemonics that were developed and fine-tuned for more than a decade by world-renowned airway experts. Thirdly, it is the only mobile app that offers a pediatric drug dosage calculator based on the Broselow-Luten color system. And, finally, the app includes valuable instructional resources (including videos, photos and illustrations) that draw from the content of The Difficult Airway Courses.”

“This App is intuitive and now even easier to use,” says Fred Ellinger, NREMT-P and Mid-Atlantic Regional Course Director for The Difficult Airway Course: EMS™. “If you’ve taken our course, the upgraded App will be a great refresher for you. Even if you’re seeing this material for the first time, you’ll appreciate right away how helpful the drug dosing calculator and educational resources are.”

The Difficult Airway App™ features:

Easy, Yet Sophisticated Adult and Pediatric Drug Dosing

• For adult dosing, a few simple taps bring the user to drug doses that take into account patient weight, body habitus, hemodynamics and special considerations (i.e., asthma, cardiovascular disease and elevated intracranial pressure). A sophisticated calculator automatically compensates for the drug dosing basis (i.e. ideal versus lean versus total body weight), the degree of obesity, and the patient’s special conditions or needs, producing dosing recommendation for all important intubation drugs.

• The pediatric drug dosing function automatically adjusts all equipment and dosing recommendations to account for the patient’s size, incorporating the color-coded, length-based system created by James Broselow, MD and Robert C. Luten, MD.      
• Users can customize the dosing calculator to include only the drugs available to them.

Decision Support