Many questions in healthcare delivery come down to this: How do you provide the right care to the right patient at the right time? Advances in digital technology are helping to answer that question by making patient information more readily accessible and adding an important fourth element—delivering timely patient care in the right place. Portable ultrasound technology is one innovation that truly demonstrates the powerful opportunities that are created by bringing healthcare to the patient.
'Getting Smaller All the Time'
Today, healthcare professionals have better access to patient information. Thanks to tech-forward tools like genomics, remote monitoring, connected devices, wearable devices, and an array of other developments,1 providers can make more informed decisions.
With the innovations in portable ultrasound technology, valuable point-of-care imaging data can be added to this mix.
Until about 10 years ago, a patient would have to go to a radiology suite—often tucked away in a facility's basement—to have a scan performed with a bulky machine, says Patrick A. Woodard, MHA, MD, chief healthcare information officer at Monument Health in Rapid City, South Dakota. "Now," he explains, "there are portable devices. They're getting smaller all the time, and I think very soon we'll be able to do the same type of thing at home. I think that last frontier is perhaps imaging that gives us real-time visibility of a patient—both internally and externally."
How Portable Ultrasound Can Change the Game
Portable ultrasound devices empower clinicians to conduct focused imaging immediately at the point of care—even if it's outside a healthcare facility. Ultrasound is evolving from a technology only experts could use in a specialty office to something that can go with them anywhere—and could even fit into their pocket.
Treating Patients Where They Are
"Anywhere" may even be the patient's home. Consider a patient who once experienced heart failure and is concerned about some swelling in their leg. Is it due to consuming a little too much salt or do they maybe have a blood clot? As Woodard points out, "The ability to do an ultrasound in the home would dramatically change their anxiety levels and, if it were a clot, reduce the time for them to get into a clinic."
This shift in portable ultrasound use could provide a degree of certainty for healthcare professionals and patients. Initially, a nurse or a technician might conduct the scan at a patient's home, but, Woodard predicts, patients may eventually do the scan themselves with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) as it continues to evolve.
The ability to capture information in real time wherever the patient happens to be is changing the way providers care for people with chronic diseases, Woodard observes. It helps to improve patient care by ensuring access to complete, real-time data, and it may reduce the burden on clinicians by streamlining the diagnostic process. Patients can begin treatment sooner because they don't need to wait for conventional imaging modalities. This benefits patients and clinicians alike.
It's still early days, but there's great potential for AI healthcare leaders like Caption Health, Inc.—who creates clinical applications using AI to assist ultrasound scans—to improve patient care by creating a more reliable, consistent process that's quicker and easier for a wider range of healthcare professionals to orchestrate, Woodard says. "Hospital-at-home programs are still nascent but really important in terms of ... how can we take some of the pressure off the health system and how can we make the patient's experience a lot more meaningful and a lot more comfortable for them."
Speeding Up Decisions in an Emergency
"We think of ultrasonography … primarily from our experience with pregnancy," Woodard says, "but it's so much more than that. For example, its use in the emergency department has been really life-changing." Consider how patient outcomes after traumatic accidents have improved because of the clinical information clinicians receive from a FAST (focused assessment with sonography for trauma) exam conducted immediately upon arrival in the emergency department. It could even be done in the ambulance—or at the accident site.
In such cases, providing the patient with the right care at the right time requires providing it in the right place.
Portable and handheld tools allow for more immediate clinical decisions—no need to waste valuable time looking for an available ultrasound system. With immediate visual validation, these connected point-of-care ultrasounds, such as Vscan Air, allow emergency department clinicians to make a call on certain conditions quickly. Then, if needed, they can perform guided interventions and other treatment plans.
Using Cloud Connectivity to Improve Workflow
Access to a point-of-care ultrasound device, no matter how sophisticated, is sometimes only half the solution. Cloud-based portable ultrasound technology allows healthcare professionals to share information in real time with their colleagues, modify their care delivery plans as needed, and improve workflows by facilitating secure collaboration and image management.
Along with cybersecurity features necessary for keeping information secure, the ability for clinicians to access images and data from anywhere, makes it much easier to obtain second opinions and make referrals. Ultimately, having all the data available in one place drives longitudinal insights that optimize care delivery.
'Innovative and Novel Ways to Solve the Problem'
Portable ultrasound—whether used in a clinical setting, the emergency department, or in a patient's home—can expedite diagnosis and care delivery. Clinicians can capture data and make a treatment plan without having to spend so much time trying to pull together all the relevant patient information—or wait days for an imaging appointment.
New advances in point-of-care reporting, like ViewPoint 6, can also streamline and simplify part of the process, accelerating and automating ultrasound workflows. Intuitive workflow solutions like this integrate directly with exam findings and images, and automatically transfer them to an EMR to reduce administrative labor.
Marrying portable ultrasound with cloud-based solutions, like other aspects of healthcare's digital transformation, takes on one of the healthcare system's thorniest problems, clinician time and burnout, and presents a solution that streamlines the process. Even before the pandemic, healthcare professionals and organizations faced tremendous pressure. Now, those pressures—especially staffing shortages—are becoming untenable.
"We don't expect it to get better on its own, so we have to come up with innovative and novel ways to solve the problem," Woodard says. "Being able to shift patient care to a place that is more patient-friendly and also helping to solve the problem [of staffing shortages and burnout] is the direction that we need to be going." It's all about delivering the right care to the right patient at the right time and in the right place.
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REFERENCES:
1. "Healthcare with No Limits: The Future of Precision Care." Bloomberg.com. Accessed June 26, 2023. https://sponsored.bloomberg.com/article/healthcare-with-no-limits-the-future-of-precision-care.
