The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) in collaboration with the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) has launched a new online, guided-simulation course developed by a team of clinicians and our department’s Center for Safety, Simulation & Advanced Learning Technologies (CSSALT). The course is titled Manual External Defibrillation, Cardioversion, and Pacing (MEDCP). It was released in February 2025 as part of the APSF’s ongoing Technology Education Initiative and provides 3 CME credits upon completion including patient safety designation and optionally 2 MOCA Quality Improvement (QI) points.
The curriculum for this course covers safe operation of a generic hospital defibrillator (also known as a manual external defibrillator, MED) used by medical professionals, not an automatic external defibrillator (AED) intended for use by the general public. In this course, learners use an online simulator to click and drag defibrillator electrode pads for placement on the skin of a virtual patient and operate a defibrillator interface to practice defibrillation, cardioversion, and pacing. Learners are guided through eight topics: an introduction, the technical aspects of defibrillators, the types of defibrillator waveforms, placing the defibrillator pads, electrocardiogram interpretation and therapy selection, defibrillation, synchronized cardioversion, and transcutaneous pacing. This course is applicable to a large audience. It will be used with UF medical students as part of the anesthesiology clerkship and with medical students in Georgia.
Course co-directors were Michael Kazior, M.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology at Virginia Commonwealth University; Daniel Rosenkrans, M.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; Nikolaus Gravenstein, M.D., the Jerome H. Modell, M.D., Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Florida (UF); and Cole F. Dooley, M.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology at UF. Also from UF, David Lizdas, BSME, Christopher Samouce, Ph.D., and Simon Mesber, BSEE, contributed to the software development along with OPS students and volunteers. Samouce was the project manager.
This is the third online, guided-simulation course developed by CSSALT as part of this series, supported by a grant from the APSF to the principal investigator Samsun Lampotang, Ph.D., FSSH, FAIMBE, the Joachim S. Gravenstein Professor of Anesthesiology at UF. Funding was also supplemented by UF’s Joachim S. Gravenstein Professorship in Anesthesiology endowment. The other two courses are on the safe and proper use of low-flow anesthesia and quantitative neuromuscular monitoring. All of these courses are available to any learner for free through the ASA learning management system.
The CSSALT team is now working with funding from the VHA IDEAS Center for Innovation, Central Virginia Healthcare System on completing two manufacturer-specific extensions of the course for the Stryker LifePak 15 and the ZOLL R-series manual external defibrillators with launch planned for June 2025.