December 11, 2017

By Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science staff

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Mayo Clinic resident Anthony Kashou, M.D., has taken it upon himself to teach health care providers the fundamentals of reading ECGs, all in the name of improved patient care.

Anthony Kashou, M.D., is on a mission to improve electrocardiogram education around the globe. And have some fun in the process.

For the past few months, he's been taking his audience on deep dives into ECG interpretation during the weekly — and weekend — training sessions. With the commitment of an instructor and the flair of a game show host.

"What we're trying to teach are the fundamentals of reading ECGs because having gone through medical school — myself not here at Mayo Clinic — while we did get some training, I feel there's a gap between what's taught and what's needed for proper patient care," Dr. Kashou, a first-year internal medicine resident at Mayo Clinic's Rochester campus, tells us. "So what we're teaching in these sessions are the fundamentals of reading ECGs and how to make them directly applicable to a patient's care."

Dr. Kashou uses fun and games in his teaching, like a recent five-hour training session on a snowy Saturday morning that — despite the weather — drew more than 70 of his Mayo Clinic colleagues.

Dr. Kashou's also been busy creating ECG-related instructional and practice videos and textbooks for his courses, as well as pop quizzes, which he posts for the more than 250,000 members of his The EKG Guy Facebook group. (You read that right.)

"During the past year and a half, we've become the largest and fastest-growing ECG online community in the world," he says. "It's been pretty fun to be a part of that, and I think the size of the group alone shows the need for something like this. Improved and enhanced EKG education, in my opinion, is an unmet need of virtually everyone in the medical field."

This story originally appeared in In the Loop, an email newsletter and blog that gives a unique perspective on what’s happening around Mayo Clinic.