EM Cases

Emergency Medicine (EM) Cases is a free, online, medical education podcast, medical blog, website and learning system dedicated to providing emergency medicine education and continuing medical education for physicians, residents, students, nurses and paramedics. There are four EM Cases podcast formats: 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, in depth-discussion on key practice changing clinical topics. In each Journal Jam Podcast we do a deep dive critical appraisal of the relevant medical literature around a particular clinical question. In the new Quick Hits Podcast a team of ten experts in particular EM topics each review a new paper or approach or clinical tip in five minute segments. One of the recurring segments is in collaboration with Canadian Journal of EM (CJEM). Finally, in the Best Case Ever Podcast we interview clinicians about a challenging case and share tacit knowledge. EM Cases curates 3 ongoing blogs: Waiting to Be Seen that covers administrative issues in EM for the frontline physician, CritCases that crowd sources approaches to challenging critically ill air transport cases in collaboration with STARS air ambulance service and the new ECG Cases that helps sharpen ECG interpretation skills through cases and concise literature review. 

2019 has been a tremendously successful year for EM Cases with a growing content team of 25 emergency physicians and residents. EM Cases is Canada’s most listened to emergency medicine podcast with thousands of subscribers, 9 million podcast downloads since 2010, with an average of approximately 160,000 podcast downloads per month. Page views on the website have increased by more than 30% since 2018 surpassing 150,000 per month. The number of users of the website has increased more than 100% over the past 3 years, with approximately 60,000 users per month.

2019 marked the launch of 2 new projects to augment EM Cases multimodal learning system: ECG Cases and the EM Cases Quiz Vault, a bank of 1000 (and growing) 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. To date, more than 2,000 people have subscribed to the free Quiz Vault.

Dr. Helman and colleagues also hosted the 4th and 5th annual EM Cases Courses, 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. 2019 marked the addition of a full day of simulation-based education that received 5/5 on the Likert scale by every participant across all sessions. 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.

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 “Excellence in Development and Use of Innovative Instructional Methods” award from the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.al 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.