Comparison of in-person versus tele-ultrasound point-of-care ultrasound training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Lack of training is currently the most common barrier to implementation of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) use in clinical practice, and in-person POCUS continuing medical education (CME) courses have been paramount in improving this training gap. Due to travel restrictions and physical distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, most in-person POCUS training courses were cancelled. Though tele-ultrasound technology has existed for several years, use of tele-ultrasound technology to deliver hands-on training during a POCUS CME course has not been previously described.

Recommendations on the Use of Ultrasound Guidance for Adult Abdominal Paracentesis: A Position Statement of the Society of Hospital Medicine.

1. We recommend that ultrasound guidance should be used for paracentesis to reduce the risk of serious complications, the most common being bleeding. 2.

Point-of-Care Ultrasound for Hospitalists: A Position Statement of the Society of Hospital Medicine.

Many hospitalists incorporate point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) into their daily practice to answer specific diagnostic questions or to guide performance of invasive bedside procedures. However, standards for hospitalists in POCUS training and assessment are not yet established. Most internal medicine residency training programs, the major pipeline for incoming hospitalists, have only recently begun to incorporate POCUS in their curricula.

Point-of-Care Ultrasound Needs Assessment, Curriculum Design, and Curriculum Assessment in a Large Academic Internal Medicine Residency Program.

Objectives: Internal medicine (IM) residency point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) curricula are being developed but often are limited in scope or components. In this article, we discuss the demonstration of a need for POCUS training in our large academic IM residency program; the development of a longitudinal curriculum; and the impact of the curriculum on POCUS knowledge, use, and confidence.

Methods: In 2014, we designed a cross-sectional POCUS survey and knowledge test for all IM residents at the University of California, San Francisco.

Credentialing of Hospitalists in Ultrasound-Guided Bedside Procedures: A Position Statement of the Society of Hospital Medicine.

Ultrasound guidance is used increasingly to perform the following 6 bedside procedures that are core competencies of hospitalists: abdominal paracentesis, arterial catheter placement, arthrocentesis, central venous catheter placement, lumbar puncture, and thoracentesis. Yet most hospitalists have not been certified to perform these procedures, whether using ultrasound guidance or not, by specialty boards or other institutions extramural to their own hospitals. Instead, hospital privileging committees often ask hospitalist group leaders to make ad hoc intramural certification assessments as part of credentialing.

Hospital Privileging Practices for Bedside Procedures: A Survey of Hospitalist Experts.

Many hospitalists are routinely granted hospital privileges to perform invasive bedside procedures, but criteria for privileging are not well described. We conducted a survey of 21 hospitalist procedure experts from the Society of Hospital Medicine Point-of-Care Ultrasound Task Force to better understand current privileging practices for bedside procedures and how those practices are perceived. Only half of all experts reported their hospitals require a minimum number of procedures performed to grant initial (48%) and ongoing (52%) privileges for bedside procedures.

Exploring Physician Perspectives of Residency Holdover Handoffs: A Qualitative Study to Understand an Increasingly Important Type of Handoff.

Background: The term "holdover admissions" refers to patients admitted by an overnight physician and whose care is then transferred to a new primary team the next morning. Descriptions of the holdover process in internal medicine are sparse.

Objective: To identify important factors affecting the quality of holdover handoffs at an internal medicine (IM) residency program and to compare them to previously identified factors for other handoffs.

Use of the slide positivity rate to estimate changes in malaria incidence in a cohort of Ugandan children.

Background: As malaria control efforts intensify, it is critical to monitor trends in disease burden and measure the impact of interventions. A key surveillance indicator is the incidence of malaria. Yet measurement of incidence is challenging.

Syphilis in the United States: an update for clinicians with an emphasis on HIV coinfection.

Diagnosis and treatment of syphilis are challenging because of its variable clinical presentation and course and the lack of definitive tests of cure after treatment. This review of the most recent literature on the epidemiology, clinical manifestations, current diagnosis, and treatment of syphilis is focused toward clinicians who treat patients with this disease. Syphilis coinfection with human immunodeficiency virus is emphasized because it is increasingly common in the United States and affects the initial presentation, disease course, diagnosis, and treatment of syphilis.