Quality assessment of point-of-care ultrasound reports for patients at the emergency department treated by internists.

Background: POCUS (point-of-care ultrasound) is an important diagnostic tool for several medical specialties. To provide safe patient care, the quality of this exam should be as high as possible. This includes solid documentation with a written report and the availability of images for review. However, international guidelines or publications about this quality assessment and its application in clinical practice are scarce.

Methods: We designed a criteria-checklist to evaluate the quality of POCUS examinations. This checklist was made based on international guidelines and protocols and was validated by a Dutch expert group using the nominal group technique (NGT). All POCUS exams in general internal medicine patients documented between August 2019 and November 2020 in our ED were evaluated using this checklist.

Results: A total of 169 exams were included. In general, the compliance for most important criteria was high, but not optimal. A clinical question or indication for the POCUS exam was stated in 75.7% of cases. The completeness of all standard views differed per indication, but was lower when more than one standard view was required. Labels were provided in 83.5% of the saved images, while 90.8% of all examinations showed a written conclusion.

Conclusions: Our research showed that the overall quality of documentation varies with regard to several important criteria. Suboptimal compliance of documentation may have adverse effects on patient safety. We have developed a checklist which can be used to improve POCUS documentation.