This message is posted on behalf of Ramzi El Accaoui, interim echocardiography medical director, and Mike Powell, assistant department director, Heart and Vascular Center.

We are aware that there have been delays in obtaining transthoracic echocardiograms and understand the importance of providing comprehensive services for our facility. Unfortunately, the Echo Lab is experiencing a significant shortage of sonographers due to a variety of reasons. We understand this is causing delays in patient discharge and medical decision making. However, we want to assure you that we are taking every possible measure to prioritize echo requests with the available resources. To support our Echo Lab services and sonographers, we need to keep the workload on our current sonographers manageable and within the nationally accepted guidelines. We ask LIPs to consider ordering transthoracic echocardiograms as outpatient testing whenever clinically feasible as not delay discharges and request a limited exam to answer a specific clinical question, as opposed to a complete transthoracic exam.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing and are committed to increasing the capacity of our echo services as soon as possible. We appreciate your understanding and patience during this challenging period. Our dedicated team is focused on resolving the issue quickly so that we can resume providing the echo services you rely on. For questions or concerns contact Mike Powell (michael-powell@uiowa.edu).