EM Cases

Dr. Anton Helman

Emergency Medicine (EM) Cases is a free, online, medical education podcast, medical blog and website dedicated to providing emergency medicine education and continuing medical education for physicians, residents, students, nurses and paramedics. In each Main Episode Podcast, two or more experts in a particular emergency medicine topic join Dr. Anton Helman in a round-table, case-based, discussion on key practice changing clinical topics, which are then carefully edited to maximize learning. 

CANADA’S MOST LISTENED TO EMERGENCY MEDICINE PODCAST

2018 has been a tremendously successful year for EM Cases with a growing content team of 23 emergency physicians and residents. EM Cases is Canada’s most listened to emergency medicine podcast with thousands of subscribers, well over 7 million podcast downloads since 2010, with an average of approximately 160,000 podcast downloads per month. Page views on the website have surpassed 100,000 per month. The number of users of the website has increased more than 100% over the past 2 years. 
 

2018 marked the development of 2 new projects to augment EM Cases multimodal learning system: In POCUS Cases, instructional videos of evidence-based, key point-of-care ultrasound techniques are reviewed using sound educational principles, and the EM Cases Quiz Vault, a bank of multiple choice questions based on the EM Cases main episode podcast content, where learners can customize a quiz to test their knowledge by episode or medical field. The Quiz Vault incorporates immediate feedback and represents the last step in the EM Cases Learning System, a learning framework designed according to multimodal, spaced repetition, learning theory. 

Dr. Helman and colleagues also hosted the 3nd annual EM Cases Course, a sold out conference, where participants got a chance to talk face-to-face with EM Cases guest experts about cases, questions, controversies, pearls and pitfalls. The course allowed the participants to be engaged in their learning in small groups with a flipped-classroom model: they listened to the podcasts related to each workshop prior to the course. The 2019 EM Cases Course will be expanded to 2 days and will incorporate hi fidelity simulation sessions at Mount Sinai Hospital.

EM Cases Journal Jam Podcast has two formats. One brings together world-renowned researchers and educators to keep learners up to date on key research publications in emergency medicine. The other chooses a specific topic, such as epinephrine use in cardiac arrest, and does a deep dive into the world’s literature on the topic.

Best Case Ever Podcast has guest experts sharing their tacit knowledge on particularly interesting cases. EM Cases also offers the CritCases Blog with challenging emergency critical care cases, Rapid Reviews Videos based on content from the main episode podcasts, and Waiting to Be Seen Blog covering important administration topics in emergency medicine. 
 

Plans are underway to introduce a 4th podcast format to the EM Cases audio offerings: EM Quickies, a collection of seven 5-minute audio bites, each by an expert on a particular topic. Each topic is one that either is generally not taught very well in EM training or that most practicing EM physicians find challenging. These include addictions, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, paediatrics, resuscitation and toxicology.

Dr. Helman’s incredible vision and execution of EM Cases goes way beyond just a novel development of an innovative instructional method. He has contributed to innovative change in how emergency physicians learn and interact. In respect of his efforts, Dr. Helman was honored with the 2018 “Excellence in Development and Use of Innovative Instructional Methods” award from the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.