by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | July 13, 2016
From the July 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“If there is a problem, you can see that the blood is flowing in the wrong direction very clearly. It’s not a question of [whether] there’s a problem, but it’s more of an absolute ‘this is where the problem is,’” says Tracy Wilkinson, director of imaging services at North Fulton Hospital. The monitor, angle of the keyboard, height of the system and prop for the feet can be adjusted, which is very important for the sonographers. Musculoskeletal pain and discomfort due to work exposure is experienced by 90 percent of sonographers, according to a 2013 study published in the journal, Work. The previous ultrasound systems at the hospital couldn’t be adjusted significantly. The height was fixed and the monitors couldn’t be moved up and down and at an angle.
Ultrasound during labor
The Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) in England received a grant in March to use handheld ultrasound to identify breech births. They will deploy 25 scanners to find babies that are positioned incorrectly during labor. Clinicians usually rely on palpation to determine if the baby is in a breeched position, but that is only accurate about 70 percent of the time. Once the midwives are trained to use the handheld ultrasounds, they are confident that the prognosis rate for breech issues will jump to 100 percent.
“What the use of ultrasound during labor allows you to do is have objective measurements on the progression of labor,” says Barbara Del Prince, director of global product and clinical management for GE Healthcare women’s health ultrasound. GE has tools, including its SonoL&D, to provide the physician with objective evidence and help the patient better understand what is happening during labor. It can automatically measure the angle of progression during childbirth and those images can be shown to the patient.
If it’s a long labor and the patient is getting tired, the images can provide encouragement that things are moving along. If things aren’t progressing and a Cesarean section is required, the tool helps the patient understand that the baby is in the wrong position and that’s why the intervention is needed. “It’s still a very new thing, but we are starting to see more and more in the literature about it,” says Del Prince. “I think in the next year, we’ll start to see more research coming out, talking about the effectiveness.”
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