LUCUS (SOB) Protocol article presented by TJ

The Dyspnea protocol scans have been practice changing! Every ED has missed many CHF diagnoses over the years. Add in doctors’ offices and clinics, and the numbers grow exponentially. Doing these scans fairly routinely in patients who present with shortness of breath NYD, especially the older patient, will automatically make you a smarter doctor. Less bounce backs and fewer M&M cases. Dr Tom Jelic presented this article by Russell et al. at EDE 3. One other note to add to Tom’s discussion… You’ll notice that the mean duration to perform these scans was 12 minutes. That is an eternity in the ED! When I do these scans, I perform a (usually) truncated version of the thoracic scan, JVP rather than IVC, and the cardiac scan. Once you have done a sufficient number of training scans, doing all these scans should take no longer than 3 minutes in the vast majority of patients. My educated guess is that these scans dragged out to 12 minutes simply due to the fastidiousness and documentation associated with doing research. Here’s Tom…