EM Cases
Dr. Anton Helman’s EM Cases, currently in its 13th year, is a leading force 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.
Having recently released its 400th podcast, EM Cases has more than 21 million podcast listens and is the most listened to emergency medicine podcast in Canada. The website has attracted nearly 3 million page views and 650,000 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 by medical residents and students, Anki flashcards.
This past year, the 2nd virtual EM Cases Summit brought more than 500 emergency medicine providers from around the world (including 100 from resource-challenged countries) for a large-scale interactive conference that featured prominent emergency medicine speakers, virtual simulations, symposiums on wellness, rural emergency medicine and global emergency medicine, procedural demos and panel discussions. The Summit’s success has fueled a third conference planned for November 2024 that is again incorporating cutting edge virtual simulation sessions as well as a new ECG interpretation course.
Several new projects have been developed and are currently running including: a rural emergency medicine podcast series, a global emergency medicine podcast series, a wilderness emergency medicine podcast series, a podcast series featuring the best of University of Toronto emergency medicine research, the written summaries of the main episode podcasts translated into French, and an EM Cases Journal Club, featuring Dr. Rohit Mohindra and Dr. Shelley McLeod.
Emergency medicine and emergency medicine education have evolved significantly in Canada having hit a steady state where the quality of care and education is unparalleled from both a historic and geographic perspective. However, there is much work to be done to improve care and emergency medicine education in resource-limited countries. Dr. Helman would like to expand the EM Cases learning system further in this regard, providing more location-specific education while also developing an online simulation program.
EM Cases, as a unique multi-modal learning system, continues to be the leader in free open access emergency medicine education in Canada.
total downloads since inception: 21,085,536
total downloads Nov 2021 – Oct 2022: 4,075,534
total downloads per day: approximately 12,000
total downloads per month: approximately 325,000
website users per month Nov 2022 – Oct 2023: approximately 55,000
