The Brigham Hospital Approach in Your Pocket
Recently, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital released a comprehensive app of all of their COVID-19 protocols. They are also available online. This app joins a growing list of guidelines and protocols from Johns Hopkins (via the Relief Central and Hopkins Abx Guide apps), WHO, Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others — but none of them have covered the topic quite this comprehensively.
COVID Protocols consists primarily of two main sections: Quick Guides and Protocols. The Quick Guides include short but detailed PDFs for Hospitalists, Intensivists, EM, ICU bundles, and PPE. The protocols are really a detailed guide on all things COVID-19 by specialty. This actually is more like a textbook on COVID that is up-to-date enough to include the recent data on dexamethasone and the recently noted inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Over 100 physicians and allied health providers at Brigham Health contributed to the app covering protocols from the basics of epidemiology and work-up to critical care, cardiology, psychiatry, obstetrics, and many more. Each of these protocols has countless subsections with detailed references.
Evidence-based medicine
The Brigham Health COVID Protocols app is the most impressive collection yet of evidence-based and expert opinion content on COVID-19 in an iOS app. The app reminds me of the trauma guidelines we use in the Army — this is an app that you can go to war with at the hospital to defeat COVID. The quality of the writing, Pubmed references, and timely content are impressive. It clearly contains/references the content of others from around the world that just makes the app even better. The content for/from specific medical specialties is and not typically seen in existing guidelines.
What providers would benefit from this App?
Students, residents, nurses, mid-levels, public health, primary care, emergency medicine, hospitalists, critical care providers, numerous medical specialties, and any provider who takes care of coronavirus patients or their contacts.
Price
o Free
Likes
- Textbook-like in its comprehensiveness, but highly usable
- Covers numerous medical specialties unique perspectives on COVID
- Available online
Dislikes
- Contains some sections clearly Brigham only applicable
- Most multimedia content requires internet access
- Not available for Android at this time
Overall
The new Brigham COVID Protocols app is now the go-to app for healthcare professionals caring for COVID patients in virtually any specialty. The app covers everything from PPE to current epi stats, workup, treatment, and guidance for specific medical specialties from Critical Care to Palliative Care, etc. The app links to numerous other guidelines such as the WHO and SCCM. Clearly, much time and effort have been taken to organize everything being used at the Brigham to fight the pandemic into a highly usable app. The app is not available for Android but is available online.
Overall Score
o 5.0 stars
User Interface
o 5.0 stars
Easy-to-navigate with pinch to zoom PDFs, detailed text, global search, and index menus.
Multimedia Usage
o 5.0 stars
The app has extensive hyperlinks to up to date information from sources around the world on COVID-19 and contains extensive references linking to PubMed.
Price
o 5.0 stars
App is free!
Real-World Applicability
o 5.0 stars
The Brigham COVID Protocols app is now clearly the best and most comprehensive all-around app for healthcare workers. Although it lacks the different translations of the WHO Academy app, the Brigham app is truly meant for point of care evaluation and treatment. The app’s protocols are all evidence-based and detailed enough to be implemented anywhere. Clearly great effort has been put into these protocols and quick guides and it shows. Highly recommended.
Device Used For Review
o iPhone 11 Pro running iOS 13.5.1
Available for download for iPhone, iPad, and online. Android app not available at this time.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
