Point of Care Ultrasound Training in Military Medical Student Curriculum

VaveHealth is a company that developed an app-based POCUS (Point of Care Ultrasound) education platform. Our objective is to provide educators with insights into novel approaches to medical education by comparing the platform to PowerPoint-based education, the standard and current technique used to instruct medical students in the United States.

We used a non-inferiority study to assess if the app-based platform was not less efficacious than the current standard of PowerPoint-based education. Thirty-three military medical students were provided with app-based or PowerPoint-based education for instructions on performing a focused assessment with sonography for trauma (FAST exam). Physicians evaluated each image and assigned a score from 1-5. The final scores were the average of all views. In addition, a two-sample t-test of the final scores and each view of the FAST was used to measure whether the VaveHealth platform was non-inferior to a PowerPoint-based model.

Overall, the VaveHealth group had lower average scores on each view and a lower average total score. There was no statistically significant difference in overall scores (VaveHealth = 7.65, PowerPoint = 9.04, P = 0.07). Subgroup analysis showed no statistically significant difference in student performance in the views of the splenorenal recess (VaveHealth score = 1.60, PowerPoint score = 1.65, P = 0.42), hepatorenal recess (VaveHealth score = 2.45, PowerPoint score = 3.00, P = 0.11), and suprapubic (VaveHealth score = 2.10, PowerPoint score = 2.46, P = 0.23) regions. In the subxiphoid region, students in the VaveHealth had a statistically significantly lower average score (VaveHealth score = 1.70, PowerPoint score = 2.08, P = 0.04).

VaveHealth education is not a viable alternative to traditional PowerPoint education for POCUS training based on the lower raw scores and statistically significantly lower scores on one of the views of the FAST exam.