ATCEMS adding new ultrasound tech to ambulances across Austin

AUSTIN, Texas - Ambulances across the city of Austin will soon be using new tech to help save lives.

With the Butterfly IQ Ultrasound, ATCEMS will be able to see potential internal injuries in a matter of seconds.  

"It’s a great device, it’s very multipurpose, it’s small and utilitarian. We can plug it into our phones and use it in any environment that we may find ourselves in," said Captian Angela Carr.

At the end of the week every ambulance will have one of these devices on board to help crews better assess what may be wrong with a patient using ultrasound technology. 

"Ultrasound basically brings a lot of the capabilities of an x-ray or a CT scan into the very back of our ambulances," said deputy medical director Heidi Abraham.

Emergency crews can use this technology to not only monitor hearts but also check if there’s anything else wrong inside a patient, quickly and painlessly. 

"When we’re looking at a trauma patient it takes about a minute to do the full exam and look for internal bleeding, collapsed lung, damage to the heart, all that kind of stuff," said Abraham. 

It can also be used to check the baby of pregnant mothers following car crashes. It’s a tool which ATCEMS said has a lot of uses to help save lives. 

"Our clinicians are trained to get a lot of information from; asking questions, to looking at vital signs, to doing physical exams with a patient, but there’s only so much they can do with just those tools," Abraham said. "The ultrasound takes us quite a distance past that and allows us to look deeper and examine a lot more possibilities for what could be causing the patient’s condition."

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