APSF on the World-Wide Web: Update

by Keith Ruskin, M.D.
The Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation Web Site is one year old. With the support of the Foundation and its corporate sponsors, it has continued to grow, providing important new services to the anesthesiology community. The APSF web site now has its own address (http://apsf.med.yale.edu), which should make it easier to find. In addition to an electronic version of the APSF Newsletter and links to other safety-related information, the web site now contains an updated APSF Grant Guide, a recommended protocol to follow after an adverse event, the TEEcher transesophageal echo tutorial, and ASA-APSF safety videos. All of this is available free of charge.

The TEEcher program is a multimedia tutorial on transesophageal echocardiography that was developed at the University of Florida. The program, along with directions for installation and use, can be downloaded from the APSF WWW site. It will work with any IBM PC compatible computer, and requires 5 megabytes of disk space and a VGA compatible video display.

ASA-APSF videos are now available for viewing anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours per day with the help of the World-Wide Web and an easy- to-use program called VDOLive. VDOLive is available free of charge and runs on any IBM PC compatible or Macintosh computer. Although it works best on computers that are directly connected to the Internet (through a hospital or university network, for example), it will produce acceptable results on computers equipped with a 28.8 kbps modem.

The VDOLive client program and instructions for use are available free of charge on the GASNet Anesthesiology Server (http://gasnet.med.yale.edu) in the Video Reference Library or directly from VDOLive (http://www.vdo.net). There is also a link to the Video Reference Library from the APSF home page. To see the videos, simply download the free client, install it on your computer (directions are included with the software) and then connect to GASNet or to the APSF home page. Then just click on the name of the video that you wish to see. Selections include the Anesthesia Machine Checkout and The Difficult Airway: Cricothyroidotomy.

Other planned features for the APSF web page include a directory of corporate sponsors and more safety-related information. As always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. Contact the APSF Webmaster at ruskin@gasnet.med.yale.edu.