Bringing Knowledge to Rural EPs
Christopher R. Carpenter · Emergency Medicine News · 2011
Editor: I really enjoyed Dr. Edwin Leap's commentary on rural emergency medicine. (“Emergency Medicine in the Sticks.” EMN 2010;32[9]:20.) In conjunction with one of my Canadian colleagues, Ken Milne, MD, who works in rural emergency medicine, we have developed high-yield, practice-changing opportunities to close the knowledge translation pipeline “leaks” through an entity called Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine (www.beemsite.com.) BEEM offers multiple free resources to funnel high-quality, widely applicable clinical breakthroughs to busy clinicians — rural or urban. The difference between BEEM and other secondary peer-reviewed information sources is that BEEM's evidence is deemed practice-changing by more than 200 BEEM raters around the world who are largely practicing EPs in rural areas without ivory towers or urban luxuries. I agree with Dr. Leap that “what many of them do is far beyond moonlighting. They are often devoted to their facilities and communities, and also to learning as much as possible about emergency medicine.” While an ACEP membership for these rural colleagues would be a step in the right direction, the question left unanswered in his column is how we get affordable streams of information to these rural physicians to enhance their abilities to update their EM knowledge base. Podcasts and vodcasts are some possible solutions for these isolated clinicians who often cannot leave their posts, but there must be additional opportunities as we steam ahead into the 21st century. Keep up the strong work! Christopher R. Carpenter, MD, MSc St. Louis, MO