Hello and welcome to an exciting new column for emergency ultrasound education, to start in the June issue.

As an emergency physician who specialized in bedside ultrasound education and research, I am very excited about having a platform for educating the broader ACEP News readership.

I am very fortunate to be part of the emergency medicine faculty at Highland General Hospital – one of the first academic emergency departments to integrate bedside ultrasound into clinical practice. Our department ethos has always been centered on clinically relevant emergency medicine education, with the specific goal of the ultrasound division to train a broad range of learners (from medical student to ultrasound fellows) in a pragmatic approach to bedside ultrasound.

The measure of educational success has always been when the clinician makes the bedside ultrasound exam a part of his or her clinical practice in order to improve diagnostic accuracy and procedural success. From the commonplace (how to quickly perform an evaluation of the gallbladder) to the complex (evaluation for the acutely dyspneic patient), ultrasound evaluations are meant to reduce both diagnostic uncertainty and error.

Over the past few years, I have taught numerous ultrasound courses at both a local and national level, learning that clinicians without a simplified approach to bedside ultrasound exams cannot integrate this very useful technology into daily practice, as they simply are unable to obtain interpretable images in a reproducible manner.

For this reason, the purpose of the column will be to detail a clear step-by-step guide detailing everything from patient positioning to probe placement to image recognition.

The underlying theme will always be to describe techniques that increase success, with the goal to simplify the process, make sense of the ultrasound exam, and ultimately integrate this into your clinical practice.

I hope you enjoy the first few installments and find them useful. Please feel free to e-mail me with suggestions and comments. I will be happy to add new topics, describe ways to avoid common mistakes, and most importantly make the column an active part of your ultrasound education.

Dr. Nagdev is the emergency ultrasound division director in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Highland General Hospital in Oakland, Calif. Along with running the Highland emergency ultrasound fellowship, reviewing articles for numerous emergency medicine journals, and running the 4th-year medical student elective in emergency ultrasound for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), he is also the current Safety Subsection Chair for the ACEP Ultrasound Section.