The Code Blue Professor and The Bloodgas Professor

One important new use for computers is in medical education. These two programs are designed to help teach how to handle cardiac emergencies using the most recent American Heart Association's Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) guidelines. The Code Blue Professor reviews the recent changes in the ACLS guidelines and simulates nine different code situations, asking the user to supply the next step in the algorithm or the drug dosages and to identify EKG tracings from an accompanying sheet. The entire program requires approximately 30 minutes to run through and covers most of the ACLS algorithms. Although it is far from a realistic simulation, using multiple-choice decisions frequently, it is useful to reinforce the algorithms and thinking processes that go on in a code situation. Explanations are provided at each step. The program by itself is not adequate to learn ACLS, nor is it meant to be. It could, however, be very useful in conjunction with an ACLS course to review the material and identify weaknesses. The Bloodgas Professor is a teaching tool for interpreting blood gas results. This program interactively teaches the three "Golden Rules" of blood gas interpretation, as presented in the ACLS textbook. The program takes the user step by step through numerous problems, and by the end the user should be comfortable interpreting blood gas results. There are several problems with this program, however. In the initial explanation of "Golden Rule Number 2" the program does not give the magnitude of the base change associated with a given pH change, which makes solving the next problem impossible for an inexperienced person encountering blood gas problems for the first time. All applications of "Golden Rule Number 3" (calculating the amount of bicarbonate necessary to correct a base deficit) are solved by the computer, never giving the user a chance to make the calculations. Most annoying was that the program will not run on a monochrome monitor. A monochrome version of the program, such as the one that comes with The Code Blue Professor, would be most useful. This program, especially if the difficulties mentioned were worked out, would be sufficient by itself to teach the interpretation of blood gases. Both of these easy-to-use programs could be useful tools to help in teaching ACLS. Because most of the learning goes on during the first time the programs are completely run and because they are rather expensive, they would be …