How it all began

I still remember with great detail when I entered the resuscitation room. The first image I had was how small the baby was, tiny in a huge adult stretcher. I put my stethoscope on his chest, it took up his entire chest. It was really total confusion because we were not ready. This is not a case where we received a call from the paramedics and had time to prepare the medications and equipment. It was just me, Jean-Seb, and Benjamin dying. We had no idea what was happening. Where were his parents? How long had he been sick like this? We called everyone, and there were finally about fifteen of us in the resuscitation room. 

Once the resuscitation began, it became clear that, among other things, we had to start an epinephrine infusion to get his blood pressure up. You can imagine, there is no way that Benjamin's life was going to depend on the dose I had in my head to start an epinephrine infusion. I got on my phone, I checked my references, and I remember having a lot of trouble making sense of all the text. I was there scrolling through trying to find the information, and the stress was so intense.

Finally, I found the initial drip rate: 0.1 mcg/kg/min. I still remember Jean-Seb's face when he said to me: "Yeah, but Fred, what's the recipe?" I didn't know what he was talking about. "Do we put the epi in D5W or saline? What size bag do we mix the epi in? What's the initial drip rate?" I thought he was the one who should know that! We called the pharmacy and were lucky enough to have a pharmacist on call. He came down and started looking through his books. We finally found a recipe: 5 mg of epinephrine in a 50 mL bag of D5W. But the problem was that this recipe wasn't in our pumps. Okay, so we have 1 mg/mL epinephrine, so that's 5 mL of epinephrine. You put 5 mL of epinephrine in the 50 mL bag, so that makes a final concentration of 5 / 55 mL = 0.09 mg/mL. Then, the child weighs 3.4 kg and I want to give him 0.1 mcg/kg/min, so you multiply by 60 to put that in hours, which gives 6 mcg/kg/h and you multiply by the weight, which gives 20.4 mcg/h. You divide by 1000 to put the mcg in mg, which gives 0.02 mg/h. You divide that number by the concentration, which gives… The problem is that Jean-Seb and I didn’t arrive at the same result. I was in my first year of practice with a baby who was dying and I was going to make a mistake of four times the dose.

We finally found the right dose, started the infusion, stabilized Benjamin, and transferred him to a pediatric hospital. A week later, he was out of intensive care without any complications. Despite the positive outcome, this experience left a deep impression on me, and I told myself that we could never let a situation like this happen again. We thought about what had been the difficulty in that case and realized that it was not a problem of diagnosis, but of resuscitation logistics. With a few friends and colleagues, we thought about how to tackle this problem. We first had the revolutionary idea of ​​creating Excel tables… with all the doses, recipes, diluents, speeds, indications, and compatibilities, so that we would never have to calculate a dose again in our lives. It took time, but we finally managed to set up an efficient system that changed the way we work.

But Excel tables were not the best idea. It's impossible to transport this out of the emergency room for resuscitations in the rest of the hospital, difficult to consult under stress during emergencies. So we decided to start working on something revolutionary for 2013: a mobile application. 

Little by little, the scientific team grew, then the team of developers too. From EZDrips ped, we evolved to EZDrips and, since 2023, to EZResus. Our ultimate dream is to develop the solution so that no one has to go through the situation I went through with Benjamin ever again.