Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 May 21;29(3):795-801.
doi: 10.1007/s40670-019-00743-z. eCollection 2019 Sep.

Ultrasound Curriculum Implementation into a State-Wide Family Medicine Clerkship

Matthew Lyon  1 , David Kriegel  2 , Elizabeth Lockett  3 , Graciela Best  4 , Dayna Seymore  2 , Ann Marie Kuchinski  1 , Rebecca Etheridge  4 , Paul Wallach  5
Affiliations

Ultrasound Curriculum Implementation into a State-Wide Family Medicine Clerkship

Matthew Lyon et al. Med Sci Educ. .

Abstract

Introduction: While point of care ultrasound (POCUS) integration into clinical clerkships provides unique educational experiences for students, there are barriers to implementation, particularly in a distributed campus medical school model in clerkships where the faculty do not often perform POCUS, like family medicine (FM). The objective of this paper is to describe the implementation and evaluation of a POCUS curriculum in an FM core clinical clerkship in a state-wide medical school campus model.

Methods: Seventeen Philips Lumify Ultrasound Systems were used in 20 clerkship sites with the requirement that students obtain abdominal aortic and inferior vena cava (IVC) images on patients evaluated during their rotation. Images were de-identified, transmitted to a university cloud-based storage account, and scored by medical school ultrasound faculty.

Results: Students were able to obtain adequate images of the aorta and IVC without direct ultrasound-trained faculty at the performance site. Of the 183 students, 119 (65%) were able to successfully submit images for scoring with failure to upload to the cloud-based storage account as the most common reason students were unsuccessful (42%). The majority of students (62%) scored in the top quartile of image quality scoring with the percentage of those scoring in the top quartile improving during the academic year from 57% in the first four rotations to 67% in the last four rotations.

Conclusion: Barriers to implementation of a POCUS curriculum into a FM clerkship in a distributed campus medical school model can be challenging due to equipment availability and issues around the successful transmission of images. These challenges can be overcome however with sufficient attention to implementation design that includes equipment sharing protocols and technical options that enhance the ease of image transmission.

Keywords: Curriculum; Family medicine; Ultrasound.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of InterestThe authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Bornemann P, Bareto T. Point-of-care ultrasonography in family medicine. Am Fam Physician. 2018;98(4):200–202. - PubMed
    1. Bhagra A, Tierney DM, Sekiguchi H, Soni NJ. Point-of-care ultrasonography for primary care physicians and general internists. Mayo Clinic Proc. 2016;91(12):1811–1827. doi: 10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.08.023. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bornemann P, Jayasekera N, Bergman K, Ramos M, Gerhard J. Point-of-care ultrasound: coming soon to primary care? J Fam Pract. 2018;67(2):70–74. - PubMed
    1. Morrow D, Cupp J, Schrift D, Nathanson R, Soni NJ. Point-of-care ultrasound in established settings. South Med J. 2018;111(7):373–381. doi: 10.14423/SMJ.0000000000000838. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Barr L, Hatch N, Roque PJ, Wu TS. Basic ultrasound-guided procedures. Crit Care Clin. 2014;30(2):275–304. doi: 10.1016/j.ccc.2013.10.004. - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources