There is a shortage of physicians and nurses across the world skilled in the care of ill children, and training on how to expertly treat children with life-threatening illnesses is only available at relatively few teaching hospitals across the world. In response to these needs, Boston Children’s Hospital and IBM launched OPENPediatrics – a peer-reviewed, open-source, and not-for-profit education platform providing information on best practices for the care of critically ill children to healthcare providers around the world.

The OPENPediatrics platform focuses on three things:

• giving doctors access to the data-driven tools they need to make critical decisions
• providing a structured learning program for doctors to gain advanced training, and
• providing access to a global community focused on the care of critically ill children.

Access the OPENPediatrics website at: http://openpediatrics.org/

Some of the resources created for the OPENPediatrics site — including those in the new multimedia library — are now being made available to the general public as well. Alongside the monthly expert videos, there are an initial 48 animations and illustrations (with many more to follow) which have been released under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA licence so that clinicians and academics may use them in their own instructional materials. As the platform grows, content will extend beyond critical care.

Overall, OPENPediatrics is a very impressive innovation and it is easy to imagine the model being applied to other health disciplines around the world.