Quality Assurance for Point-of-Care Ultrasound in North American Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowships.

Abstract

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and the American College of Emergency Physicians released a policy statement endorsing the use of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) by pediatric emergency medicine (PEM) providers. This statement specifically recommends that emergency departments have a credentialing and quality assurance (QA) program for POCUS. There is limited knowledge of how QA for POCUS is currently carried out in pediatric emergency departments with PEM training programs. We sent a cross-sectional web-based survey to all 81 PEM fellowship-training programs in the United States and Canada between June 2016 and June 2017. Sixty-six of 81 programs (81.2%) responded. Sixty-five percent of responding PEM training programs had POCUS-trained faculty or a POCUS champion at their institution. Forty-six percent had a POCUS fellowship in their institution, with 10 programs having PEM-specific POCUS fellowships. Programs with POCUS fellowships were more likely to save all images, review all scans, review scans more frequently, provide feedback, and bill compared with programs without POCUS fellowships. Point-of-care ultrasound is growing in PEM fellowship-training programs, with a majority of programs now having faculty members trained or interested specifically in POCUS. Most programs prefer more frequent and thorough QA processes, and programs with POCUS fellowships are more likely to have more frequent and thorough QA processes.