Hybrid Inpatient POCUS Course for Rising Senior Family Medicine Residents

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is increasingly used in inpatient settings to evaluate patients. Common applications include cardiac, lung, hemodynamic assessment, and venous access. Teaching and achieving competency in these applications are highly resource intensive and require hours of dedicated faculty support. We evaluated the impact of a hybrid asynchronous and hands-on inpatient POCUS curriculum for family medicine residents transitioning from intern to senior roles.

Family medicine residents participated in an inpatient POCUS course during a dedicated 2 week transition period between postgraduate years (PGYs) 1 and 2. The curriculum included 100 minutes of asynchronous precourse videos followed by a 4 hour in-person session with POCUS trained faculty. The hands-on session included scanning live patients and ultrasound-guided venous access on homemade task trainers. Participants completed pre- and postintervention surveys as well as a written examination.

Thirteen family medicine residents completed the course. Participants reported an increase in overall comfort with inpatient POCUS, with a mean improvement of 0.9 points on a 5-point Likert scale composite score (p<0.001). Self-reported comfort improved across all domains, including image acquisition, image interpretation, and clinical integration. Written examination scores did not improve preintervention (64.1%) to postintervention (65.4%) intervention (P = 0.78).

A brief hybrid inpatient POCUS course was associated with improved confidence in performing and integrating POCUS exam types for the inpatient setting, but did not result in improvement in a written knowledge assessment. These findings suggest that a short introductory boot camp can be beneficial and may be strengthened with a longitudinal curricula and more robust competency assessments.