This is the blog of Dr. Elias Jaffa, MD, MS, FACEP. I am, first and foremost, an emergency physician. After my undergraduate education at Brown University in Providence, RI where I met the incredibly bright and talented woman who would later become my wife (and eventually the 5th official member of The Doctors Jaffa), I moved to Cleveland, OH where I obtained my MD along with a concurrent Master’s of Science in Applied Anatomy at Case Western Reserve University. While I initially thought I wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon, fate gradually steered me towards the true passion of my academic and professional life - emergency medicine. I subsequently moved to Durham, NC in 2013, where I completed my 3-year EM residency training at Duke University Hospital. While there, fate once again nudged me in the right direction, and after a brief stint as a member of the Duke EM faculty, I eventually helped start a fellowship in emergency ultrasound and became the first fellow of the program in January 2017. After graduating fellowship, I returned to a full-time faculty position, this time as the Assistant Director of Emergency Ultrasound. I was also honored with the designation of Core Faculty for the residency around that time.

At the end of the 2018-2019 academic year, my wife (literally a month after giving birth to our second child) graduated medical school, and we finally bid a bittersweet farewell to Durham in order to move to South Carolina, where my wife is currently completing her own residency training.

During my fellowship year, I was fortunate enough to have the time and brain-space to begin getting reacquainted with one of my deepest passions (aside from my concerningly beautiful children/wife and point-of-care ultrasound) - technology. I’ve always had a particular attraction to all things hi-tech, especially software development (growing up, it always struck me as basically magic - being able to create something tangible that is able to have an actual impact on the physical world using little more than your own brain), and as it turns out, the timing couldn’t be more perfect as we are currently experiencing an incredible expansion of interest in and utilization of POCUS, thanks in no small part due to the rapidly evolving technological landscape.

In the time since I set up my first ground-up web server by manually installing a LAMP stack on an old MacBook Pro in my kitchen, I’ve managed to learn or relearn multiple programming languages and development platforms (primarily focusing on HTML, CSS, Javascript, Dart, NodeJS, Flutter, and server architecture in general via the Raspberry Pi ecosystem) and have released two major (for me) projects into the world - the Sonostreamer platform, a free and open-source system that can be used to livestream ultrasound images over the internet for telePOCUS (for either live expert interpretation or to facilitate real-time remote education/supervision), and POCUSQR, a POCUS quick-reference app (currently Android-only).

I hope this blog will serve as a source of both inspiration and information for those who may be interested in learning or teaching about technology, medicine, point-of-care ultrasound, or the intersection between any or all of them. Please feel free to reach out to me directly with any feedback, tips, suggestions, recommendations, questions, or cat gifs you may wish to pass along.

Stay healthy out there, friends, and as always, happy scanning!

Eli