May 24, 2022 — Butterfly Network, Inc., a digital health company transforming care with handheld, whole-body ultrasound, and The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) announced that MUSC will leverage Butterfly Blueprint, the company’s system-wide ultrasound platform. Together with Butterfly, MUSC aims to transform patient care, health education, and medical research by empowering its clinicians, students, and researchers with point-of-care access to AI-powered, handheld ultrasound.
“At MUSC, we strive to stay on the front-end of innovation to advance how we educate and train healthcare providers and serve the people of South Carolina,” said Patrick Cawley, M.D., MUSC Health CEO and executive vice president of Health Affairs, University. “With Butterfly’s technology, we’re empowering care teams to know more about what’s going on with a patient sooner by quickly and easily gaining visibility inside the body so they can make more informed care decisions. We’re excited to bring such an evolved point-of-care ultrasound tool to our health system. We believe it will have tremendous impact across all care settings and especially in our rural and underserved settings, where access to specialists and imaging can be very difficult for some patients to manage or afford.”
As the world’s first and only whole-body Ultrasound-On-Chip technology capable of turning a compatible smartphone or tablet into an imaging tool, Butterfly enables the practical application of ultrasound information into the clinical workflow of all healthcare practitioners. Butterfly enables image acquisition and interpretation of different areas of the body and can be used for things like automated bladder volume calculations with 3D visualizations and to ease and guide central line placement and injections. The device fits in a healthcare professional’s pocket and is powered by a unique combination of cloud-connected software and hardware technology, easily accessed through a mobile app.
MUSC executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost Lisa K. Saladin, PT, PhD, agreed, adding: “It is critical that we provide our students opportunities to train with advanced technologies that they will be using to assess and treat patients both during their clinical rotations as students and after graduation as healthcare providers. We are excited about this collaboration and the opportunities it will provide for our students.”
MUSC will begin its Butterfly rollout initially focusing on practitioners and clinicians at MUSC Health Florence Medical Center, MUSC Health Marion Medical Center, and at the No. 1 hospital in South Carolina as named by U.S. News & World Report, Charleston-based University Medical Center. A major component of the affiliation will be defining new models of care in rural settings with the help of this technology, hence the immediate deployment at two of the hospitals in MUSC’s Regional Health Network: Marion Medical Center and Florence Medical Center. At the same time, MUSC will also work with Butterfly to incorporate point-of-care ultrasound training across the organization, including within its education curriculum for medical students, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants, in addition to exploring areas for clinical research.
“It is an incredible opportunity to partner with MUSC in our shared objective of improving clinical decision-making with an easy-to-use, AI-enabled imaging tool that is accessible at the point-of-care," said Todd M. Fruchterman, M.D., Ph.D., Butterfly Network’s president and CEO. “Together with MUSC, we’re thrilled to explore how Butterfly can enhance patient care, advance medical education, and model a new standard of care delivery for the next generation of clinicians and care teams. We believe the information that becomes available when Butterfly is deployed at scale has the power to improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency across care settings and throughout an enterprise.”
For more information: musc.edu
May 06, 2024 
