PEM Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) Program

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Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) has become a critical piece of patient care with the advent of newer, cost-effective, and more efficient technology. Over the past 10 years, POCUS has expanded both within and across specialties, including pediatrics. It has become the standard of care when it comes to procedures that were previously done blindly. It is part of the ATLS trauma protocol for blunt abdominal trauma. It is advantageous to have a robust POCUS program in order to accommodate the push for decreased patient wait times, increased patient satisfaction, earlier recognition of critical illness, and improve first-pass success rates of procedures, especially when resources can be limited (such as during night shifts).

Having an imaging modality such as POCUS readily available allows for the benefit of immediately detecting the most common causes of critical illness, allowing for more rapid intervention and better patient outcomes. POCUS has modified the clinical practice of many subspecialties. It does so to the extent that it functions as the clinician’s eyes, hands, and brain as an extension of the physical exam, often leading to calling POCUS “the new stethoscope.” Similar to the stethoscope, the information obtained by the use of POCUS is a function of the expertise residing between the operator’s ears. This where it becomes essential to have a well-organized, rigorous, and thorough training program and QA for POCUS providers across the institution to ensure that one’s capabilities with POCUS are not exceeded. This includes the ability to archive and review images with software that is practical to do so, which in this case, is QPATH, which is used across the country as the ideal program of choice by the most well-established POCUS programs. In addition, it will be necessary to upgrade the outdated equipment currently in use, because the field of POCUS has grown exponentially over the past 10 years and the newer models allow for the full capabilities that POCUS offers that the older machines have not been engineered to provide.

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