Logistics of perioperative diagnostic point-of-care ultrasound: nomenclature, scope of practice, training, credentialing/privileging, and billing

In modern health care, the performance of many bedside procedures and the evaluation of critically ill patients is facilitated by point-of-care ultrasound (PoCUS).1 PoCUS has unique and evolving value to each specialty. Thus, the chronology of adoption of PoCUS has varied significantly across specialties. For instance, anesthesiologists were early to adopt PoCUS for regional anesthesia, vascular access, and transesophageal echocardiography, but slow to integrate other PoCUS applications that were more rapidly adopted by acute care specialties such as critical care and emergency medicine.2 These latter 2 specialties have shown that PoCUS of the heart, lungs, abdomen, and/or lower extremity veins can be used to rapidly narrow the differential diagnosis of hypotension, respiratory failure, and other kinds of acute organ dysfunction.1,3,4 Since acute organ dysfunction management is also part of the routine work of anesthesiologists, it is not surprising that anesthesiologists are now trying to integrate more diagnostic PoCUS into their work. Furthermore, separate from acute organ dysfunction, diagnostic PoCUS has relevance to anesthesiologists in nonacute settings, such as the preoperative evaluation clinic where the ultrasound data can help with risk stratification and the evaluation of chronic symptoms. © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.