St. Paul's Hospital Emergency Department The Continuous Pursuit of Excellence in Patient Care and Academic Emergency Medicine

This week I feature 2 sites I find very useful for clinical decision making and teaching.

First is MDCalc, a great online medical calculator with a primary focus on Emergency Medicine and Critical Care.  You will find it featured prominently in this site's Clinical Links Rules/Resources section.

Second is the NNT.  the NNT turns a critical and analytic eye to landmark research, reviews and meta-analyses.  In a nutshell, they evaluate each paper and then calculate a Number Neede to Treat (or Harm) for the intervention.  The Traffic Light infographic at the top of each review gives you a Go/No Go/Caution advisory about the paper's findings.  Then there is a detailed explanation of how they reached their conclusions. See how they do it all here.

They have also begun to review Diagnostic Tests (Likelihood Ratios) and Risk Assessments.

The thread connecting the 2 sites is Graham Walker (@grahamwalker) an MD/geek extraordinaire, who created both sites.  He is worth a follow on Tumblr and Twitter.