EM Cases

Dr. Anton Helman’s EM Cases, currently in its 14th year, is the most listened to Emergency Medicine podcast in the world and a leader in the Free, Open Access Medical Education movement, widely known as FOAMed. As an exemplar of this movement, EM Cases produces freely accessible, emergency medicine-related podcasts, written material, quizzes, push emails, and videos.

With almost 500 podcasts published, EM Cases has more than 23 million podcast listens and remains in the top 10 podcasts in medicine in Canada. The website has attracted nearly 3 million page views and 630,000 users in the past year.

Not surprisingly, the number of users of the website has increased over the past three years, as its multi-modal learning system attracts medical learners from all stages of training and beyond. EM Cases Quiz Vault, for example, is a growing bank of multiple-choice questions started three years ago and has been used by more than 10,000 people from around the world. More than 1000 multiple choice questions have also been made available for free on the most popular study aid tool used my medical residents and students, Anki.

Last year the 2nd ever virtual EM Cases Summit brought more than 500 EM providers from around the world (including 100 from resource-challenged countries) for a large-scale interactive conference that featured prominent EM speakers, virtual simulations, symposiums on wellness, rural EM and global EM, procedural demos and panel discussions. The Summit’s success has fueled a third conference planned this November 2024 which already has 400 registrants that is again incorporating cutting edge virtual simulation sessions as well as a new ECG interpretation course.

Several projects are currently running including: curated videos to accompany some of the best EM Quick Hits podcasts, a rural EM podcast series, a global EM podcast series, a wilderness EM podcast series, a podcast series featuring the best of University of Toronto EM, the written summaries of the main episode podcasts translated into French and a Journal Club.

EM Cases continues to ‘give back’ to SREMI by generating tens of thousands of dollars annually through donations, advertising and registration to the EM Cases Summit to support SREMI’s endeavors. EM Cases, as a unique multi-modal learning system, continues to be the leader in podcast-based free open access emergency medicine education in the world.