ACEP emPOC -

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Emergency Medicine Point of Care (emPOC) app is a cross platform application designed to provide evidence-based, Emergency Medicine clinical content in a point-of-care tool designed for use at the bedside. Content within this app is curated from the field’s top experts and thought leaders. A web version of this content is available separately on ACEP’s website.

For the Android and iOS Flutter release of emPOC (Dec ‘21), we rebuilt emPOC from scratch in collaboration with ACEP’s staff. We are harnessing Firebase as our cloud-hosted backend to allow for synchronized distribution of content updates (when relevant) without the need to publish changes to the app’s code each time a new tool is created.

We also identified a need to build a high-quality content management system (CMS) that leans into the native strengths inherent to Firebase, so we created a means to connect spreadsheet data to Firebase via the JSON standard. This made it far easier to add and update emPOC content into Firebase.

If you have an app idea that requires dynamically-displayed layouts and online / offline sync of content with the cloud, then our efforts with emPOC may serve as a good starting point.

Features

• To access this tool, you must first login via ACEP’s Single Sign On

• The re-launch of the app includes twelve point of care bedside tools. You can create additional tools via the cloud (Firebase) without adding new code. The app will then dynamically display new tools / content

• App information, acknowledgements, and tables are displayed as dismissible dialogs

• Clicking on a tool will show custom content, icons, and headings as determined by Firebase

• Within each heading, you may expand/collapse content and quickly swap to other headings

• All content are displayed dynamically, including the background colors for each tool

• emPOC also includes custom / advanced JSON specifications to display videos, hyperlinks, and (some) HTML formatting. As noted above, all of these are specified via a Google spreadsheet, thereby optimizing the means by which additional information is added / updated into Firebase