Ryan Hebbler
FUJIFIILM Sonosite employees are passionate about many things, helping people is at the top of the list. As is the case for Ryan Hebbler, our Director of Strategic Accounts, which means helping customers, colleagues, clinicians, and everyone else he deals with. He's passionate about ultrasound, and it shows.
Carena Holmes
Carena Holmes, senior systems engineer sees the big picture and the details. She is always thinking about how to improve our systems and how teams can work more harmoniously. When asked about her favourite project, she replies with a secretive smile, but that just goes to show how interesting the work she's doing is. She's a creative thinker and a passionate advocate for her work. And like most Sonositers, she's also passionate about her music. Check out her top 5 all-time favourite songs here:
I Wanna Dance with Somebody – Whitney Houston
Humble- Kendrick Lamar
Kiss- Prince and the…
Keith Williams
Keith Williams, Executive Director of Programme Management at FUJIFILM Sonosite, is celebrating his 25th anniversary with the company. When asked what keeps him coming back, Williams said, "It's the people. I get to work with some phenomenally talented and passionate people who are dedicated to making a difference in the world. And the products we make have a really important role to play in that." In addition to his work at FUJIFILM Sonosite, Williams is also a passionate music fan. He shared his top 5 songs of all time with, which you can enjoy below.
David Bowie - Heroes (Live Aid, 1985…
From the CEO: Find Work that Matters
Find Work that Matters at FUJIFILM SonositeLife is finite, which makes time our most precious commodity.The COVID pandemic has taken this concept and dropped it right in the lap of millions of working people in this country. “Why am I spending the majority of my waking hours doing this work, and is that how I want to spend the time I have left on this planet?” Welcome to the Great Resignation.The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company conducted a survey in 2021 and found that nearly two-thirds of US-based employees surveyed said that COVID-19 has caused them to reflect on their…
POCUS Profile: Dr. Jennifer Hanko
Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is widely used in nephrology for guiding the creation of fistulas and informing decisions on their viability and performance for dialysis. Dr. Jennifer Hanko is a consultant nephrologist at Belfast City Hospital, a 900-bed modern university teaching hospital in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Here, she explains the impact of POCUS on her clinical practise and describes the benefits, for both staff and patients, of using POCUS.I originally learned to use ultrasound for vascular mapping and arteriovenous (AV) fistula assessment during a fellowship in…
User Stories: Spreading Point-of-Care Ultrasound to the Philippines
West Virginia University Department of Emergency Medicine Ultrasound fellow, Kristine S. Robinson, M.D. is taking Point of Care Ultrasound (PoCUS) to the international level by residing in Metro Manila, Philippines for a month, equipped with a Sonosite Edge machine from Sonosite’s Global Health Programme. Dr. Robinson volunteered her time and expertise as a visiting physician at St. Luke’s Medical Centre – Quezon City (SLMC-QC), spending time with their Emergency Department residents and staff to teach instructive and hands-on sessions, and accompany residents on scanning shifts. …
Charitable Medical Mission Uses Ultrasound for Maternal Care in Zambia
Australian nonprofit Globalinks Medical Foundation is dedicated to providing healthcare to global communities in remote locations where access to healthcare services is limited. Globalinks was founded by Dr. Peter Locke and his wife Carolyn following their experiences volunteering overseas, where they witnessed a prevalence of of illness, disease, and child mortality rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Globalinks works with local health staff, providing much needed supplies and equipment and planning with local health ministries to achieve sustainable progress towards positive health…
Dr. Trish Henwood Publishes Article about Using POCUS to Treat Ebola
Emergency physician Dr. Trish Henwood, president and co-founder of the PURE Initiative, has been in the frontlines of the battle against Ebola since 2014, when she traveled to Liberia to confront an outbreak. Dr. Henwood recently wrote an article for The New England Journal of Medicine outlining the lessons she has learned since those extremely challenging days.Dr. Henwood begins her article in the starkest terms: “Half my patients died. They died from one disease, but so many different deaths.” From that sobering introduction, she explains how clinical appearance did not always predict an…
Doctor Uses Ultrasound-Guided Injections to Treat Peruvian Farmers
Sports medicine specialist Dr. David Sealy, MD CAQSM works with the Volunteers in Medical Missions, a Christian medical organisation that sends 15 to 18 medical missions a year to countries around the world. Dr. Sealy returned from a 10-day trip in the high Andes in Peru, visiting five villages over a five-day period to provide medical care. Dr. Sealy’s team included eight doctors, two nurses, a Pharm.D., and five more volunteers. Partnering with a church in Lima, his team set up clinics in schools, churches, posta medicas (small public health clinics), and other community buildings. They saw…
Ultrasound Helps Canadian Doctor Give Back to Her Two Countries
Emergency physician Dr. Chau Pham is the founder and Co-Chair of Canadians Helping Kids in Vietnam (CHKV), an organisation established in 1995 to help improve the lives of the poorest in Vietnam by improving conditions that directly empower children.
Dr. Pham knows all too well the challenges Vietnamese children face. She was a refugee herself, coming to Canada from Vietnam when she was seven years old in 1983. She was diagnosed with TB, and had to stay in a Thai refugee camp for treatment for a year before she was admitted into Canada. It was during this formative time that she came to…
Letter from Uganda: Ultrasound Vital in OBGYN Care
Image courtesy of Acclaim Physician Group
Dr. Kent Brantly, a clinical faculty member of the John Peter Smith Family Medicine Residency in Fort Worth, Texas, recently returned from a medical mission in Kampala, Uganda. He loaned a portable ultrasound device from Sonosite, which proved indispensable for both clinical and educational purposes. He writes:
“I wanted to write to you to say thank you for the service provided by FUJIFILM Sonosite Global Health. I led a group of three residents from our program in Texas on a month-long international rotation in Kampala, Uganda, where we…
Sonographer Takes Sonosite Edge to Belize
Deborah Majure RT, CV, RDMS, RCC is a diagnostic medical sonographer who knows the importance of ultrasound in resource-limited environments. She recently returned from a charitable medical mission to Belize, sent by First Presbyterian Church, Pascagoula, Mississippi, which is affiliated with Word at Work ministry. This was their fourth mission to Belize. Deborah came with a radiologist, nurse practitioner, resident nurse, pharmacist, and a construction team. She also brought a Sonosite Edge portable ultrasound machine with C60x and HFL38x transducers loaned from the Sonosite Global Loaner…
Medical Mission Uses Portable Ultrasound Machine in Liberia
Allison Byrne is a physical therapist and co-leader of a medical team from the Park Community Church in Chicago. She recently returned from a medical mission to assist the Light Evangelism Ministry (LEM) clinic in Fendell, Liberia. The LEM clinic provides diagnoses and treatment via IV and oral medications to any patients who come to be seen with only limited electricity from a generator.Allison’s team consisted of six people with various medical backgrounds (including a resident nurse, osteopath, and physician assistant) and two more people who primarily supported the ministry’s school. They…
Keeping Players on the Field with the Aid of Ultrasound
Professional sportsmen and women rely on rapid, accurate assessment and treatment of injuries to allow them to regain match fitness and return to the field at the earliest opportunity.At Harlequin FC rugby club, point-of-care ultrasound complements physical examination as an aid to diagnosis, as team doctor Courtney Kipps explained. Harlequins is an English Premiership rugby union team based in Twickenham. The club’s medical team needs to ensure that the pool of players available for selection on match days is as large as possible. This not only involves maintaining the current health and…
Teaching USGRA in Papua New Guinea
An advocate for the expansion of the use of point-of-care ultrasound, Dr. Yasmin Endlich is an anaesthesiologist who practises medicine in Australia and regularly travels to Papua New Guinea to provide medical training to local physicians. Here, she explains why nerve blocks are a crucial tool in a rural anaesthetist’s arsenal:Papua New Guinea, a country of over 8 million people, is looked after by less than 30 anaesthetists, half of whom are still in training. Not coincidentally, I have actually met every anaesthetist in Papua New Guinea.This year, the 54th Medical Symposium was held in…
POCUS Profile: Dr. Fidel Fernandez
Ultrasound is a vital tool for vascular surgeons in the 21st century. In the following essay, Dr. Fidel Fernández Quesada, a sixth-generation vascular surgeon and associate professor at the University of Granada, Spain, describes the difference that ultrasound has made to his clinical practise, and reflects on what his forefathers would have made of such technological advancement."I have worked in the field of angiology and vascular surgery for 25 years, and currently practise both at the San Cecilio University Hospital in Granada and privately. I am also the current president of the…
Disaster Relief Team Borrows Ultrasound For Flood Victims
During recent floods in the southern Indian province of Kerala, the Kerala Flood Disaster relief team sent by Kasturba Medical College, Manipal borrowed a Sonosite M-Turbo ultrasound machine to assist in assessing and triaging flood victims.
The team arrived in Chengannur, one of the worst-afflicted areas of the flood zone, and began working at the District Hospital.
Dr. Jayaraj Balakrishnan, Professor and Head of Emergency Medicineat Kasturba Medical College, reported that the machine was used to assess roughly 570 flood victims who were treated in…
A Letter from Dr. Samuel Abelson
The following is a letter from Dr. Samuel Abelson, an emergency medicine physician who lives in Minneapolis.Four years ago, Project Medishare began teaching point-of-care ultrasound to the staff at Hospital Bernard Mevs in Port Au Prince. Through the Sonosite Global Health programme, we have borrowed multiple loaner machines to use in teaching.In 2016, Project Medishare was able to purchase a discounted M-Turbo through Sonosite SoundCaring and bring it to Haiti. This past spring, we once again were able to donate two M-Turbo ultrasound machines to the ICU/PICU staff at Hospital Bernard…
Reducing Costs and Increasing Care Quality With Ultrasound-Guided PIVs
How does ultrasound-guided vascular access improve care and reduce costs? In a new article in Axis Imaging, FUJIFILM Sonosite's Chief Medical Officer Diku Mandavia writes about how Matthew Ostroff, ARNP, a vascular access specialist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare System, a 700-bed hospital in Paterson, N.J., chartered St. Joseph's recently implemented ultrasound-guided vascular access programme in its emergency department, which ranks as the second busiest in the nation."Procedural ultrasound…acts as a visual GPS that allows clinicians to map the patient’s blood vessels and identify the…
When IV Insertion Seems Impossible
Any medical professional with hospital experience knows how crucial peripheral IV access can be. Getting fluids and medications into a critically ill or injured patient can make or break the effectiveness of their treatment.At the best, a “difficult stick”—that is, a patient whose veins are difficult to insert a needle into—presents a problem that involves multiple needle pricks (with increasing pain after each attempt), frustrated and flustered medical staff, and a delay in treatment. At worst, a difficult stick can mean mounting medical complications as dehydration worsens; and the eventual…