Lumify with Reacts helps create a model for longitudinal ultrasound education across borders

November 8, 2018

The idea came while Dr. Andrea Dreyfuss was doing her emergency medicine residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA. Could Dr. Dreyfuss, with the help of others, create an Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship program? Not only would it be rewarding to be a part of building an ultrasound program in her home country, but the nation of Peru is poised for a point-of-care ultrasound revolution.

Hospital Nacional Dos de Mayo, a public hospital in Lima, a city of 8 million people, established an Emergency Medicine residency 17 years ago, which had a major impact on patient lives. Furthermore the Peruvian officials recently required that Emergency Departments in Peru have access to ultrasound. However, the new regulations didn’t come with support for ultrasound training which has resulted in a lag in developing ultrasound expertise in POC and thus a delay in widespread POC ultrasound adoption in emergency medicine.

Dr. Dreyfuss saw this gap in ultrasound training as an opportunity. She presented her idea to Dr. Arun Nagdev, Director of Emergency Ultrasound at Highland Hospital in Oakland, CA.

While the need for ultrasound training in Peru was clear, Dr. Nagdev had been involved in training clinicians on POC ultrasound around the world and knew that when an established ultrasound program didn’t already exist, it would be an uphill battle for the local clinicians to get the ongoing training and mentorship they needed to get the program off the ground. Programs with similar goals always face the same challenges: the lack of access to ultrasound experts significantly impacts longitudinal learning, and supplementing ultrasound expertise across a distance is both expensive and time consuming.

The need was great, the appetite was high, but how would they provide access to ultrasound experts to ensure effective longitudinal ultrasound education for the three Fellows in Dr. Dreyfuss’s Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship program?

To address this, Dr. Dreyfuss set up a clinical rotation exchange between the Fellows at Hospital Dos de Mayo and key physicians at Highland Hospital Emergency Department. While these efforts provide a great learning environment, there remained the challenge of having 24/7access to experts and mentors for on-going education and consultation in difficult cases.

Dr. Dreyfuss and Dr. Nagdev have now enlisted a new tool: Philips Lumify with Reacts, integrated tele-ultrasound. Lumify provides outstanding image quality, simplicity and mobility to facilitate ultrasound learning and diagnosis anytime, anywhere. Reacts directly connects physicians at Dos de Mayo with experts at Highland providing live tele-ultrasound at the bedside. It doesn’t matter where the physicians are – in the same facility, across town, in another city or on another continent. Lumify with Reacts allows them to share ultrasound images, two-way video and voice, virtually bringing experts to any clinical case.

For Dos de Mayo and Highland, this has already had a huge impact. In one case, real-time consultation with a remote expert helped the clinician in Peru determine that the patient was suffering cardiogenic shock, not sepsis due to pneumonia as originally thought. The clinician immediately changed the clinical management of the patient.

In another case, one of the residents came in to help out on her day off. She noticed a patient in the waiting room with a gunshot wound who looked seriously ill. The resident used Lumify with Reacts, and with the real-time guidance of the consulting physician, she was able to determine that the patient had a hemothorax that was not seen on x-ray. With ultrasound guidance they placed a needle in the chest and found blood and subsequently placed a chest tube. This is an example of the ease of using Lumify with Reacts to help make confident clinical decisions.

A new path for education

Dr. Nagdev is encouraged by the ability to have real-time consultation with experts as he feels this creates a model for longitudinal education that can be used worldwide. Having access to a POC expert provides an important element to any ultrasound training program, and is key to developing and retaining POC ultrasound champions. Lumify with Reacts facilitates longitudinal learning experience, and brings expertise directly to clinicians where and when it’s needed – in near or distant emergency departments, clinics and small hospitals.

Want to know more about Lumify? Click here.

Lumify with Reacts helps create a model for longitudinal ultrasound education across borders

Lumify with Reacts helps create a model for longitudinal ultrasound education across borders

Related stories