P0295 - Performance of Pediatric Emergency Medicine Faculty After Point-Of-Care Ultrasound Credentialing Implementation

Objectives:
As point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) continues to evolve, a national standardized curriculum for training and credentialing PEM physicians is still lacking. The goal of this study was to assess PEM faculty in performing and interpreting POCUS during implementation of a training curriculum.

Methods:
Sixteen PEM-fellowship trained faculty with either limited or no prior POCUS experience trained to perform four ultrasound studies. Twelve of the sixteen completed the training with a goal of credentialing within 12-months of implementation. For each faculty, we assessed competency by comparing pre- and post-curriculum test assessments, and by evaluating quality of POCUS acquisition and accuracy of interpretation. We also monitored the amount of continuing medical education (CME) hours completed to ensure a minimum didactic component.

Results:
We found a significant improvement in POCUS competency comparing pre- to post-curriculum test assessments (55.4% vs. 75.6%; p<0.0002). One thousand two hundred and seventy images were submitted over the course of the curriculum. Accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were 98.23% (confidence interval [CI] 97.18-98.97), 97.01% (CI 92.53-99.81) and 98.43% (CI 97.33-99.81), respectively. Faculty self-rating of image quality was significantly higher than expert reviewer rating of image quality (3.4 + 0.86 vs. 3.2 + 0.56; p<0.0001). We found no change in expert reviewer rating of image quality over time. Faculty completed a combined 232.5 CME hours (average 17.4 + 10.8), with the majority of hours coming from an institutional POCUS CME workshop.
Conclusions
These results show that a straightforward, structured curriculum can improve PEM faculty POCUS competency.