Philadelphia Medicine Winter-Spring 2021 - 7

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Since then, researchers are developing new calculators around
the coronavirus.
Habboushe said there are about 30 COVID-19 calculators in
development and, as of press time, MDCalc has published about
five of them. Those calculators " have met our criteria for being good
enough to be built into our site, " he said.
According to radiopaedia.org, the PECARN Rule stands for the
Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network traumatic
brain injury algorithm, which aims to identify children at very low
risk of clinically important traumatic brain injury.
Habboushe said that the PECARN head trauma rule could rule
out conducting a CAT scan.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS),
the health care arm of the government, reached out to MD Aware
LLC in mid-November last year. HHS is working with researchers
out of Yale and other schools and organizations to develop a score
that HHS has created to judge COVID-19 mortality. HHS asked
MD Aware LLC to host the score on MDCalc.

" It's a very strong example: It doesn't happen every day for us, for
" It's a very safe, centered way of reducing radiation and costs, " sure, " Habboushe said. " Researchers in this state see MDCalc as
the main place to put news for us, because doctors have been using
he said.
MDCalc for so long that it stands for approval. "
There are so many rules in emergency medicine that are incredible,
Habboushe wants to spread the word about how useful and
Habboushe said.
effective MDCalc can be.
" And now, with coronavirus, we are having more and more really
" There are a whole bunch of these calculators that help COVID-19, "
interesting rules come out, " he said.
he said. Hospitals can get reimbursed from the government for them,
One example, used in emergency medicine, is when a patient
either through the Federal Emergency Management Agency or through
arrives who has hit his or her head.
the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
" Do they need a CAT scan? " Habboushe said. " There's a rule
for that. Someone has chest pains, and I'm worried about a heart
attack. There are several rules that help guide my care: If I need to
be worried about a heart attack, how worried do I have to be? Can
Habboushe said that, after MDCalc was created about 15 years
I send someone home or not? I can run a tool for it. "
ago, more rules continued to evolve.

Few scores

COVID-19 toolkit
MDCalc has developed a coronavirus toolkit.
When the coronavirus came on the medical scene early last year,
MD Aware LLC delayed work on other projects and put together
a system to help with sets of rules that could help doctors navigate
patient issues during the pandemic.
" Doctors lean toward these types of clinical rules when there's a
big variability in practice, when they don't have as much experience
with this type of classification, " Habboushe said. " That is exactly
how doctors feel about the coronavirus. So when the coronavirus
hit, we stopped other projects and said: What can we do for the
pandemic? And we started building, looked at all the different tools
on MDCalc, and put together a set that we thought would be helpful
for the coronavirus. "

" Fifteen years ago there were a few dozen of these scores throughout
medicine, " he said. " We put them on a website so that docs could
easily look them up. "
The aggregate website became very popular.
" We have gone from two dozen to about 600 scores, " Habboushe
said, across almost every specialty in medicine.
How popular is MDCalc? His best estimate is that somewhere
around two-thirds of doctors are using it on a regular basis.
" We are the main reference for them, " Habboushe said.
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