Saturday, December 17, 2011

Free Emergency Medicine Ultrasound "Course"

EM ultrasound is difficult to learn by using books with text and static images.  I’m just finishing a quick week of introductory ultrasound in which the interns walk around the department with a senior resident or attending and free-scan patients.  You can’t learn ultrasound without doing it.  But, going home and reviewing the images you saw and reading about the specifics in static books seems backwards to me.  So, I decided to learn mostly by videos/images and short directed articles.

I've also been thinking a lot about crowdsourcing lately.  As a resident, I don't have time for much else besides medicine and my loved ones.  So how does a busy person take big ideas and make them into reality?  By soliciting the help of a crowd of experts.  

At BIDMC/HAEMR, a fellow resident and I set up an internal site on our resident-wiki page where residents post info to help one another out in our EM learning.  I started collecting the links of all the ultrasound videos I watched this week in order to post them onto this site.  But, I realized that the crowd of ultrasound learners could be much larger than just the 36 other residents at my program.

So I've begun to design a free ultrasound course.  I've posted the first 3 lessons (cardiac, aorta, and GB/RUQ), and as I continue to learn ultrasound, I will post more lessons.  

I am in no way an expert on ultrasound, so I'll need your help to crowdsource this project.  Please comment to this post, and contribute your own videos/sites/podcasts/apps/etc, and I’ll update the “course” appropriately.

Note: I have no affiliation with any of the resources that I posted.  If I ever do, I'll be sure to disclose it.  If you post a resource that you are affiliated with, please let us know that as well.

- Teach, MD