Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography
Original articleThe Architecture of a Mobile Outreach Echocardiography Service
Section snippets
Our outreach echocardiography practice
Drs Bijoy Khandheria, Jamil Tajik, and James Seward established our outreach echocardiography program in 1989 in collaboration with several sonographers and one secretary. Since then, our outreach echocardiography program has grown steadily and currently treats a high volume of patients (Figure 1, Figure 2). Today, the outreach echocardiography team includes 12 full-time cardiac sonographers, 24 cardiologists trained to interpret echocardiographic studies, 3 secretaries, and 1 full-time
Image and data management
The standard of practice at our echocardiography laboratory is a comprehensive examination that includes extensive and methodic image acquisition and Doppler-based hemodynamic quantification. The goal is to obtain a systematic assessment of the structure and function of the heart and great vessels to provide information that will aid patient treatment. We apply the same standard of practice to our outreach echocardiography program.
Our outreach practice benefits from a robust technologic base.
Outreach practice personnel
The success of our outreach echocardiography program depends on a highly trained and dedicated team of outreach sonographers. The real-time collaboration that occurs routinely among cardiologists and sonographers at our institution’s main echocardiography laboratories cannot be duplicated within the outreach program. Therefore, our outreach sonographers are required to make independent decisions about acquiring relevant supplemental clinical information, optimal images, and important data.
Conclusion
We have described the history, philosophy, and organization of our outreach echocardiography program. Its success may be attributed to the highly trained and dedicated cardiac sonographers and secretarial support staff, state-of-the-art ultrasonography equipment, and prompt interpretation by cardiologists. We have described our program to encourage other cardiology groups that are considering establishing an outreach practice or seeking to improve the proficiency of an existing program. We hope
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