From Sound Waves to Clinical Saves: How Ultrasound Can Help Differentiate Your Dyspneic Patient in the Field and Change Your Management

Get ready to change the way you evaluate and manage your dyspneic patients in the field! POCUS is not just for trauma patients! This session will delve into the use of prehospital POCUS in differentiating the cause and treatment of patients with shortness of breath. Cookie cutter management for COPD, pneumonia, asthma and CHF is a thing of the past. We will use case studies, real ultrasound video images, and discussion to help you parse out what is the cause of your patient’s shortness of breath and how you can better treat these patients as a prehospital clinician with POCUS. Whether you use ultrasound every day within your service or you have never held a probe in your hand, you will walk away from this session being able to recognize B lines on a thoracic ultrasound and how that changes your management with patients you transport with shortness of breath.

Session Outline:
In this session, we will start out with a few introduction case studies of real patients who have presented with shortness of breath. Just like in real life, sometimes can be hard to differentiate on scene whether someone in extremis due to dyspnea is suffering from a heart failure exacerbation, COPD exacerbation, pneumonia, etc as a lot of patient either are poor historians or have a history of all causes of shortness of breath. After the introduction of these cases, we will highlight the fact that ultrasound in the field can quickly help differentiate between these etiologies. Next, we will review how to obtain the thoracic exam views on ultrasound, which includes views to acquire and briefly how to obtain those views. From there, we will discuss B lines – what they are, why they occur and what they mean. We will then tie back into the initial case studies and show what ultrasound findings we expect to see with each patient and how that would change our management of these patients.