White paper
Enhanced Workflows and Better Care: 4 Benefits of Departmental Adoption of Butterfly Hardware and Software
For a single health care provider, point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) supports faster and more accurate patient assessment and treatment. Across an entire department, POCUS is transformational—enhancing diagnostic workflows, bolstering provider collaboration, and elevating care quality across the patient population.
When healthcare organizations implement Butterfly iQ3™ and Compass™ software, they achieve holistic, widespread value. Let’s explore the benefits of a systemic solution to support advanced assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.
The Butterfly difference
*Not all presets, imaging modes and features are available everywhere.
Operational efficiency
Handheld ultrasound with the Butterfly iQ3 removes the logistical delays of the cart-based approach, expediting imaging and expanding ultrasound access. Physicians can keep the probe in their pocket wherever they go. As a result, they can scan patients at the bedside within minutes, answer clinical questions, and determine next steps for more efficient and effective care.
Dr. Manoj Wickramasinghe, an anesthetist and intensivist trainee, notes, “If you have to go two floors up to get a machine, you’re much less likely to use ultrasound for the patient in front of you.”
Real-time diagnostics reduce reliance on off-site imaging or referrals, which can also delay diagnosis and treatment. By letting physicians identify a patient’s condition at the point of care, the iQ3 unlocks proven POCUS benefits across health systems, from shorter hospital stays during emergency visits1 to faster time to diagnosis2.
Successful departmental POCUS implementation also needs the right software solution — one that can support secure image sharing, compliant documentation, and billing. Butterfly delivers. Compass™ compounds the efficiency of the handheld iQ3 by offering a critical software foundation for your ultrasound program. The cloud-based, device-agnostic tool brings together images across machines and across departments, keeping vital information organized and connected to the patient.
You can’t scan without a system. The glue that holds point-of-care ultrasound together is Compass.
Physicians scan, document, and complete a study in minutes with iQ3. The study is tied to the patient’s electronic medical record simply by selecting the patient’s name from a worklist. Custom worksheets ease documentation, and Compass automatically generates an order for compliant images to transfer into the image archiving system. to simplify billing.
Collaboration and training
When a healthcare system implements a POCUS program with the iQ3 and Compass, departments can better collaborate to coordinate patient care with shared access to ultrasound scans. Specialists from another department can review images from the emergency department or other service line to make more informed decisions or guide additional testing.
Cloud-based software is obviously the best solution where multiple departments can be looking at the exact same thing and singing from the same song sheet.
A high-quality ultrasound program requires consistent quality reviews of scans to ensure proficiency. Without the right software, consistent QA is difficult, if not impossible. With Compass’s centralized storage and QA dashboard, administrators can review images, provide feedback, and reduce variability across ultrasound scans.
Economic benefits
Some handheld diagnostic tools come at a similar price point to the Butterfly iQ3, but they offer more limited functionality. Departments can reallocate the budget spent on these tools to a durable, whole-body probe that meets most of the clinicians’ everyday needs at a reasonable price point.
The cost-effectiveness of a handheld device is particularly striking when compared to a cart-based ultrasound machine.
You could be getting 10 Butterfly devices or 3 to 4 Butterfly probes and the cloud-based software for your small department for the same price as a cart-based machine.
In addition, Compass contributes clear ROI for healthcare departments and organizations through more automated billing. In the United States where providers bill for ultrasound, organizations must have a retrievable ultrasound image and documentation tied to patient information. Compass enables compliant documentation and automatic order generation for completed scans, driving significant revenue increases.
Three guidelines for successful rollout of departmental POCUS
How can you ensure that your implementation of handheld ultrasound and cloud-based software is a success and achieve the benefits we’ve shared here? Dr. Wickramasinghe offers three key pieces of advice for POCUS advocates to help their department thrive.
1. Build a business case
As we’ve seen, handheld ultrasound and cloud-based software from Butterfly offer tangible benefits to clinicians, which only multiply with wider adoption at the departmental level. If you’re advocating to your colleagues for a reallocation of funds to these tools, paint a picture of these benefits, not just at a general level but specific to your organization.
Speak to the tangible patient benefits, efficiencies, and cost savings. Bring data from studies that show reduced length of stay, higher patient satisfaction, and quicker initiation of management thanks to handheld ultrasound. Map out how these results would support the goals of your department or organization to help others see the value.
2. Know your audience
When introducing handheld ultrasound into a department, you don’t just change processes. You change the culture of an entire team to drive better diagnostics and care.
Clinicians who aren’t familiar with handheld ultrasound may see the tools as an extra step or new complication, so emphasize the everyday benefits to their practice, such as easier access to imaging and simpler workflows to upload and share images.
Adjust your message depending on your audience. A clinical director is likely familiar with POCUS, but an administrator without ultrasound experience may not grasp its impact at the point of care. In this case, it’s important to clearly explain the advantages of POCUS, handheld ultrasounds and the cloud-based system to hold it all together.
3. Create clear ultrasound protocols
Before you introduce POCUS on a department level, define and document what handheld ultrasound devices should (and shouldn’t) be used for. Set these as boundaries to help the entire staff know when a handheld device is right and when another tool would better serve.
Build governance processes as well to ensure that patient data stays safe and secure — which is much easier with a cloud-based software like Compass.
Start with clear guidelines and processes for using handheld probes—including cleaning and charging—to smooth the transition to a new way of examining and caring for patients. Maintain a QA program to ensure quality scans by credentialed clinicians.
The future of ultrasound happens at the point of care
Ultrasound is already rapidly transforming the way physicians assess, diagnose, and treat their patients. The sooner healthcare organizations embrace POCUS at a departmental level, the better trained their staff will be, the simpler their workflows will be, and the happier and safer patients will be.
With the help of handheld probes and cloud-based software from Butterfly, teams of providers can unlock faster treatment and better care, one exam at a time.
The health care practitioner featured in this whitepaper is a compensated health care practitioner consultant.
1 Carrera KG, Hassen G, Camacho-Leon GP, Rossitto F, Martinez F, Debele TK. The Benefits and Barriers of Using Point-of-Care Ultrasound in Primary Healthcare in the United States. Cureus. 2022;14(8):e28373. Published 2022 Aug 25. doi:10.7759/cureus.28373
2 Fraleigh CDM, Duff E. Point-of-care ultrasound: An emerging clinical tool to enhance physical assessment. Nurse Pract. 2022;47(8):14-20. doi:10.1097/01.NPR.0000841944.00536.b2
Unlock POCUS for your department with Butterfly
Explore ultrasound at the point of care for your department by seeing the Butterfly iQ3 and Compass for yourself. Book a demo with our team to begin adopting and integrating ultrasound to transform patient care.
