Digital Education for Health Care Providers: An Advanced Cardiac Life Support Resource

Advanced cardiovascular life support (ACLS) refers to a set of urgent treatment guidelines for cardiac emergencies to improve patient outcomes. Strong evidence supports online interactive content in facilitating student learning and engagement. This project introduces an innovative approach to ACLS education, namely a digital ACLS simulation to promote medical resident learning of relevant protocols. No similar resource was found in existing literature, supporting the potential merit of creating this tool for medical education. A scoping review was conducted on current ACLS guidelines to inform interactive content creation with MEDLINE [PubMED] and Web of Science. From this review, a decision tree based on validated care guidelines was derived, guiding digital application development. An online prototype was constructed in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS frameworks. The creation allows users to input cardiovascular emergency patient information and output relevant care instructions based on American Heart Association guidelines. Evidence-based descriptions were provided for each decision, referencing credible external resources for further learning. This interactive application may enhance ACLS protocol learning. Next steps include simulation testing with medical residents to establish whether statistically significant benefits are observed. Long term, this project may inform the development and revision of similar digital resources to enhance medical education delivery.