Ultrasound Curriculum Implementation into a State-Wide Family Medicine Clerkship

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.

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.

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.

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.