Point of Care Ultrasound ­ (POCUS) for Physicians Course

There is growing evidence that point of care ultrasound (POCUS) has the ability to augment the traditional physical exam and improve patient care by providing real time, noninvasive, low-cost imaging to help guide clinical decision-making.  The Critical Care and Emergency Medicine communities were early adopters of this technology and several aspects of POCUS are now considered core competencies in both disciplines. In comparison, Internal Medicine has been a slow adopter of POCUS. Among the most important barriers to integration of POCUS into Internal Medicine residency training is lack of faculty expertise.

In the 2016-15 Academic Year, we offered introductory POCUS workshops for the faculty in the Division of Hospital Medicine as a function of faculty availability over the course of a few months. Based on the lessons learned from this experience we propose a course that provides the faculty with: 1) an immersion experience in which the faculty would learn all modules over the course of a week consecutively to help provide adequate practice and redundancy required to learn to obtain and interpret images. ; and 2) the opportunity to continue to receive feedback on knowledge and skills learned in the course as they incorporate POCUS into their clinical practice. With a successful offering of POCUS in 2017, and a high interest from the medical community we have decided to offer additional courses for the 2018-2019, academic year.  Given the expenses incurred to offer this course in a state-of-the-art facility, we will be charging a registration fee to offset these expenses, and continue to maintain the equipment and licensures necessary to continue teaching POCUS to our WCMC community.

The proposed course is scheduled for a full week (5-weekdays, at 6 hours a day). For each week-long offering, 6 full-time academic faculty members will be selected to participate in a series of online didactic (SonoSim®) and small-group hands- on Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) sessions under the supervision of an academic hospitalist (ACCP certified in POCUS) to practice acquiring and interpreting images on live models.  The instructor to faculty ration will be 1:3. Topics include the diagnostic characteristics and limitations of the POCUS exams most useful for an internist including: vascular, pulmonary, cardiovascular, biliary, and renal. Following the week-long course, the graduates will be encouraged to continue to practice acquiring images by actively incorporating POCUS in their clinical practice on inpatients and offered the opportunity to periodically meet with the instructors after the course to receive feedback on the quality of images acquired and their interpretation skills.

For more information please contact Karla Jacome at kjjacome@med.cornell.edu.