Regional anesthesia and pain medicine
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Reg Anesth Pain Med · Feb 2020
Improved diagnostic accuracy of pathology with the implementation of a perioperative point-of-care ultrasound service: quality improvement initiative.
The utility of perioperative point-of-care ultrasound (P-POCUS) is rapidly growing. The successful implementation of a comprehensive P-POCUS curriculum, Focused PeriOperative Risk Evaluation Sonography Involving Gastro-abdominal, Hemodynamic, and Trans-thoracic Ultrasound (FORESIGHT), has been demonstrated. This project sought to further evaluate the utility of P-POCUS with the following aims: (1) to assess the ability to train the FORESIGHT curriculum via a free, open-access, online platform; (2) to launch a P-POCUS clinical service as a quality improvement (QI) initiative; (3) to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the P-POCUS examinations to formal diagnostic studies; and (4) to compare the P-POCUS diagnostic accuracy with the diagnostic accuracy of traditional assessment (TA). ⋯ A P-POCUS service can be developed after training facilitated by an online curriculum. P-POCUS examinations can be performed by anesthesiologists with a high degree of accuracy to formal studies, which is superior to TA.