We’re honored to welcome Dr. Oron Frenkel, an emergency physician based in Vancouver, as Chairman of our Medical Advisory Board.
A renowned point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) educator, Dr. Frenkel will help deliver educational webinars and training videos to enable more clinicians to learn to effectively use ultrasound. He will also support the Clarius research and development team to help guide innovations to meet the evolving real-life demands of physicians for a variety of specialties.
Dr. Frenkel is well versed with medical systems on both sides of the Canada and US border. He trained to be a physician and completed his residency at the Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. He also completed a fellowship in point-of-care ultrasound at the same hospital.
We recently interviewed Dr. Frenkel to learn more about his mission to spread the use of point-of-care ultrasound. Watch the video or read the blog story to see why we’re excited to have him on the Clarius team.
Why did you join Clarius?
“By taking on the role as Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board for Clarius, I feel that it puts me in a position to help continue my mission of developing and expanding the use of point-of-care ultrasound. It helps with product development and making the devices more useful to their end users. It helps with spreading education and enabling new users and current users to find better applications. And ultimately, it helps improve patient care.”
What do you think the future holds for POCUS?
“Point-of-care ultrasound is at a transitional moment. We trained with carts that were pretty old school. They were good enough to get the image. Now we’re seeing app-based POCUS run on the smartphones that all of us physicians already have. And the integration with the computing power in the devices makes amazing images available at our fingertips. It has really spread way outside the realms that anyone thought was possible even five years ago.”
Is image quality important for novice users?
“Image quality correlates very tightly with confidence in clinical decision making around image interpretation. So, what I’ve seen is novice users generating images and not feeling quite confident or sure enough in them to make clinical decisions. And when physicians don’t feel confident, they don’t take the proper actions to really save a patient time and energy or sometimes even a life, or they’re not able to rule things out and end up ordering other tests. So, I think image quality lends itself to improved confidence at the point-of-care and enables the technology to really spread into wider realms and empower novice users to feel more confident in their early skills of diagnostic testing.”
How does Clarius image quality compare to traditional POCUS systems?
“Clarius image quality is comparable to any of the carts that we use in the emergency department, with the benefit of the handheld applicability and integrating into my personal smartphone.”
Do you believe there’s a benefit to using a wireless scanner?
“The wireless scanner is great for sharing devices among different physicians. It crosses the boundaries of requiring a specific device that pairs with it. And it also enables really quick and easy cleaning and transition from one patient to the next.”
How is Clarius helping to expand the use of ultrasound?
“Being able to drop the price point and deliver this cart-based system in a small pocket-sized device at an affordable price point, combined with the ease of use, that’s is a real game changer for people trying to get into the point-of-care ultrasound market and bring diagnostic testing to their patients.”
We met this spring when Clarius was chosen as the wireless ultrasound device for the Digitial Technology Supercluster, a POCUS project led by Dr. Frenkel to bring portable ultrasound scanners across the province of British Columbia for faster diagnosis of COVID-19. It became clear over the summer that we should work together to deliver POCUS solutions to the world.
To learn how Clarius HD can help with your fight against COVID-19, you can contact us anytime or learn more here.
