Dr. Chris Fox on Advancing Point-of-Care Ultrasound Education for Clinicians and Med Students

On today’s episode of the Medical Imaging for All podcast, Ohad speaks with Dr. Chris Fox, Chair of Emergency Medicine at UC Irvine. They discuss how Chris became "one of the fathers of the point of care revolution in ultrasound" and his passion for teaching practicing physicians and med students the skill of ultrasound. They also talk about how education is the biggest barrier to unlocking ultrasound's potential today, why appropriately-classified  reimbursements are key to further adoption, and how ultrasound is expanding to primary care physicians and potentially into patient homes.

Topics discussed:

• How Chris got into emergency medicine, and how his early adoption of ultrasound led him to become "one of the fathers of the point of care revolution in ultrasound."
• Why education is one of the biggest barriers today to unlocking the potential of ultrasound, and how that can change by starting ultrasound training in med school.
• The ways in which AI could develop to instruct the operator on how to use it, closing the gap in education.
• How the first revolution in ultrasound — a political one that needed to break down barriers between specialities claiming ultrasound as their own — has been won, but how the next revolution will be around creating more standardized, widespread education for all.
• The challenges to getting reimbursed for ultrasound use today, and why point-of-care ultrasound needs to be categorized correctly.
• Why primary care physicians are using ultrasound more in their practices, and how ultrasound may extend to in-home patient monitoring.
• The patient impact on using ultrasound, and how patients remember the doctors who "went a little step further" by using ultrasound.

Resources Mention: 

• Twitter
• The Point of Care Revolution: Ultrasound | Chris Fox | TEDxUCIrvine