Some institutions are now incorporating basic ultrasound training into medical school programs.

“It is going to be the way of the future,” Dr. Wang says. “I really think that we’re going to use ultrasound to replace the stethoscope even.” Doctors may instead perform ultrasound with probe-equipped smartphones.

Even then, she says, the technique will be effective only with the kind of advanced training that lets doctors know what they’re visualizing and whether they’re in an artery or vein, for example.

Amid mounting evidence that ultrasound use can improve outcomes, Melissa Tukey, MD, MSc, a pulmonology critical care physician at Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., cautions that there may be other downsides. Cost, for example, may be a limiting factor for some hospitals. Another is physician training and comfort: Although younger physicians have grown up with the technology, she says, many older physicians lack exposure to and comfort using it. “Because ultrasound is now mandated as a quality measure for a number of the procedures, it really limits, by default, the performance of those procedures to a generation of clinicians that’s been trained in ultrasound,” she says.

Hospitals, then, need to ensure that an embrace of ultrasound technology doesn’t leave older physicians out in the cold.