Meet the Associate Ultrasound Fellowship Director: Dr. Megan Guy

It makes intuitive sense that the ability to see, in real time, inside the body of a sick patient would allow for more rapid diagnosis and expedite appropriate treatment plans. This is entirely possible with bedside point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), and Dr. Megan Guy, the Associate Ultrasound Fellowship Director at UC Irvine Department of Emergency Medicine, sees this noninvasive, rapid, and radiation-free imaging modality as an emerging standard of care.

Dr. Guy chose emergency medicine given the fast pace and high acuity – a specialty in which it is imperative to make quick decisions with high fidelity. In her fourth year of medical school, Dr. Guy realized that the ultrasound probe was the magic tool that allowed her to do just that. She recognized the invaluable utility of point-of-care ultrasound in competent hands and dedicated her 4th year of medical school to mastering it. After performing over a thousand scans before graduating medical school, she became well-positioned to serve as the go-to person for her co-residents to consult with POCUS-related questions. Despite the lapses in knowledge that every intern feels at the beginning of residency, Dr. Guy’s ultrasound skills gave her one thing to feel confident in. She continued using ultrasound on almost every patient throughout residency, further solidifying her ultrasound proficiency and repeatedly proving its indisputable utility. When it became time to choose her subspecialty in pursuit of a career in academic emergency medicine, her passion for ultrasound made it the most obvious fellowship choice.

Now, as the Associate Ultrasound Fellowship Director at UC Irvine, Dr. Guy is maintaining the program’s EUFAC accreditation status, recruiting fellows for the next academic year, and training the current fellows to become the next generation of leaders in emergency medicine point-of-care ultrasound. She is also running the ultrasound elective for the medical students and residents, performing Quality Assurance on all ultrasound scans performed in the Emergency Department, and conducting over 30 ongoing ultrasound research projects with UC Irvine undergraduate student researchers.

Dr. Guy’s vision is to ultimately improve patient care and decrease patient wait times by replacing slower imaging modalities like CT and MRI with a fast, radiation-free, and highly reliable alternative: bedside POCUS. The caveat is that ultrasound is only reliable in the hands of a well-trained clinician, which is where Dr. Guy’s role comes in. She intends to train every medical student, resident, and fellow in the art of ultrasound image acquisition, interpretation, and clinical correlation. Everything from the superficial structures to internal organs is scannable, and diagnoses such as retinal detachment, appendicitis, and life-threatening internal bleeding are made possible with the aid of a bedside ultrasound probe.

Dr. Guy is pushing this rising standard of care forward at the UC Irvine Medical Center, and she is involving her colleagues, fellows, residents, medical students, and undergraduate researchers in this initiative. She is attending over 10 regional, national, and international ultrasound conferences per year with the goal of becoming a national leader in the ultrasound community continually keeping up-to-date with the most cutting-edge ultrasound news. She intends to bring this knowledge back to UC Irvine and incorporate it into the ultrasound curriculum in order to create a new generation of physicians who are highly trained in this rapidly evolving field of point-of-care ultrasound. Dr. Guy’s mission statement is to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care with point-of-care ultrasound, to expand the clinical applications of ultrasound, and to train the next generation of physicians do the same.