IAM Medical Guidelines

IAM Medical Guidelines helps Canadian medical professionals become more familiar with a curated selection of the many Clinical Practice Guidelines they are increasingly expected to know about. We currently have guidelines for Asthma, COPD, Breast Cancer Recovery for primary care and patients, genetic screening, deprescribing of BZRAs, CHEIs, memantine, PPIs, AHGs and antipsychotics, and Shared Decision Making for Abdominal Aortic Aneurism, Breast Cancer, Cervical Cancer, Cancer of the Colon, Lung Cancer and Prostate Cancer, with more to come!

IAM is a single container for these Guidelines; we started with an accredited program in partnership with the Canadian Thoracic Society and their 2012 Guideline Update: Diagnosis and Management of Asthma in Preschoolers, Children and Adults. This has been followed with recommendations for the diagnosis and treatment of Asthma in preschoolers (2015), Severe Asthma Guidelines (2017) and COPD (2017).

The app also includes Breast Cancer Survivorship guidelines deriving from the work of Marian Luctkar-Flude RN PhD, Alice Aiken PhD, Mary Ann McColl PhD, Joan Tranmer RN PhD and Hugh Langley MD CCFP, published in Canadian Family Physician (Le Médecin de famille canadien) Vol 61: november 2015. These key guideline recommendations for post-treatment breast cancer care were synthesized from existing guidelines produced by credible cancer care and primary care organizations, and align with the most recent guidelines published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Cancer Society in the Journal of Clinical Oncology Vol 34(6): 2016.

Notably, we include Breast Cancer Recovery guidelines for Breast Cancer survivors; this is the same information as in Breast Cancer Survivorship, but presented for non-medical professionals.

A more recent addition is GEC-KO, a channel published by Genetics Education Canada whose mandate is to increase genetics literacy in health care professionals and thereby enhance quality of care in order to optimize the health and well-being of Canadians.

The most recent channel is Deprescribing, a Decision Support application applying the methods and algorithms developed by Dr. Barb Farrell and Dr. Cara Tannenbaum and their collaborators. See https://deprescribing.org.

We simplify study by:
• Featuring only guidelines published by recognized authorities
• Selecting the recommendations most important to the intended audience of each guideline, using a Delphi process
• Working with guideline authors to condense each recommendation for easy scanning on the “Topics” page
• Using Push Notification to gently highlight a different recommendation each week
• Presenting each recommendation at three levels; Topics (searchable list of condensed recommendations), Recommendation (the full monte) and Guideline (the recommendation shown in context in the full guideline)
• Optimizing the guideline for easy reading on small devices, while maintaining access to the full original content

We encourage study by:
• Promoting reflective learning, using ITPCRG’s research-proven Information Assessment Method (https://www.mcgill.ca/iam/home-page); for each recommendation, a short questionnaire encourages reflection on how the information could be valuable to the practitioner.

All the app content is stored on our servers and downloaded to your device when you add a new channel, so you can study anywhere – the subway, in-flight, at the cottage… As new guidelines are added, they will become available for download, and corrections and updates to existing guidelines will be incorporated seamlessly. The app keeps itself up-to-date.

Our goal is to become a one-stop shop for Medical Guidelines, so that you only need to invest your valuable time (and iPhone homepage real estate) in a single app, rather than downloading and learning about a separate app for each guideline.