Paramedic and Future Physician Leans on the CORE 300™ Digital Stethoscope

Paramedic and medical student Will Alton wears the CORE 300 Digital Stethoscope

Will Alton has worked most of his career in situations where there's no time to second-guess what he's hearing. Over nearly eight years in EMS, he's taken on some of the highest-acuity calls in the Memphis area, experience that's given him a foundation to do even more for patient care. He's now pursuing that goal in medical school while continuing to work EMS shifts, and he's always relied on Eko for clinical support, now using the CORE 300 Digital Stethoscope during calls and in medical school training.

“When you're making split-second decisions as an EMS provider, you don't have the luxury of questioning what you hear. So I invested in Eko because I needed to be confident in what I was hearing.”  

Adopting the CORE 300 as his everyday scope

As a longtime Eko user, Will gravitated toward the CORE 300 immediately. The difference was noticeable right away: the CORE 300 felt light enough that his first instinct was mild skepticism, because he expected it to be bulkier than it is. Using it changed his mind. "Sometimes I forget it's around my neck," he says.

The rest of his impressions built up through regular use. The device picked up sound cleanly with little need to adjust its placement, and setup required little effort. Battery life stood out most: he found himself charging it far less often than he expected, thanks to an auto-off feature that did the work he usually forgets to do himself.

For someone managing an unpredictable schedule between EMS shifts and medical school, that kind of reliability isn't a small thing. It's one less variable to think about before a call.

Why reliable sound matters in the field

Will has always understood the problem digital stethoscopes solve in the EMS world. A moving ambulance with the engine running and sirens on is nearly impossible to hear in, so for a paramedic transporting a critical patient, that's not a minor inconvenience — it can shape the next clinical decision he makes. Eko's noise cancellation makes Will's critical assessments possible in conditions where an analog stethoscope simply can't keep up.

While working as an ER paramedic, Will was treating a patient who had severe fluid buildup in her lungs — buildup bad enough, he says, that it's still one of the worst cases he's heard in his career. Rather than just describing what he'd heard, he played the recording he'd taken with Eko for the attending physician. They immediately went to evaluate the patient, he says, once they understood the severity of what Will had caught. 

Aiming for bigger change

Will grew up in a family of firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs. He found his own way into the field, moving from EMT to critical care paramedic, earning various certifications through the years. Nearly a decade in the field opened his eyes to changes he wanted to make in how EMS operates — changes he believed he'd have more standing to make as a physician. He enrolled in the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Baptist Health Sciences University in Memphis with a plan already mapped out: an emergency medicine residency, an EMS fellowship, and eventually a role directing medical care for an EMS agency.

Access to care is a theme Will comes back to often.

He's seen patients go without basic evaluations simply because of where they live, both close to home and further away, including on a medical mission trip to Guatemala where he ran cardiac exams for patients who otherwise wouldn't have had access to them. 

It's part of why he was drawn to a school of medicine that emphasizes treating the whole patient, not just the complaint in front of him.

Will hasn't stepped away from EMS while in medical school. He still picks up paramedic shifts, including regular coverage at a children's hospital, and remains one of a small group of critical care paramedics his company calls on for its most complex transports. He also teaches CPR and advanced life support courses on the side, balancing it all alongside a full school schedule and family life.

Applying sharper listening skills in medical school

Medical school has asked something different of Will's ears than EMS work does. As a paramedic, a cardiac exam typically means confirming an adequate rhythm and rate and moving on.

Standardized patient exams now require more granular listening, such as isolating specific valve sounds and distinguishing between types of breath sounds.

These are the kind of focused exam skills he didn’t build much of in the field.

He's used the CORE 300's guided exam mode to work through that process methodically.

He switches between cardiac, pulmonary, and all-purpose filters depending on what he's assessing, and cross-checks any unusual findings against multiple filters before drawing conclusions. 

He's also become an informal resource for classmates preparing for the same exams, walking them through how to isolate different heart and lung sounds using the same guided workflow.

A stethoscope ready for every setting

Whether he's running a critical care transport or working through a standardized patient exam, Will's needs come down to the same thing: a stethoscope that keeps up with him, no matter how demanding the environment.

That's exactly what the CORE 300 was built to do: powerful enough to cut through the noise of a moving ambulance, durable enough to survive a long shift, and precise enough to support the kind of exams med students are expected to master.

The CORE 300 gives providers like Will one less thing to second-guess, so they can put their full attention where it belongs: on the patient in front of them.