Wireless Technology Gives Heart-Attack Care a Head Start

By Chuvala, Bob

Danbury Hospital has added a technological link to its 14month- old acute cardiac-care services that wirelessly transmits EKG information to the hospital emergency room while paramedics are still making an initial on-site assessment of the patient.

The hospital installed a $15,000 receiving station that lets emergency room doctors read the wireless EKG transmission and determine if the patient is having a heart attack. If so, a cardiac team is ready to begin performing angioplasty – a lifesaving procedure that opens clogged heart arteries – as soon as the patient arrives.

“Our goal is to get your artery open under 90 minutes from the time you bit the door,” said Dr. Andrew Keller, chief of cardiology. That 90-minute “door-to-balloon time” is considered crucial to determining survival. “It’s the time during which optimal care can be administered to preserve heart muscle,” he said. Each minute a person suffers a heart attack, heart muscle is dying, so “the quicker we identify and treat patients, the better the outcome.” Each of the city’s five ambulances and all the paid and volunteer ambulance services in surrounding communities have been able to transmit EKG tracings wirelessly to the emergency room in the past, but two things were connection between the EKG unit and a cell phone, Keller said.

For decades, state bureaucrats denied the hospital the ability to conduct acute cardiac care, negating the need for the wireless system.

“It wasn’t a real prerequisite to have that,” Keller said. “Before, when someone came in here with an acute heart attack the emergency room team would administer some clotbusting medication and transfer the patient to another hospital” in lower New Haven or Fairfield County.

But since the state allowed Danbury and other hospitals in Connecticut to provide acute cardiac care, “patients are no longer transferred, so if someone comes in at 2 am., we have to mobilize the team, and that takes time.”

Now paramedics can send a 12-lead electrocardiogram from a patient’s house or workplace, and the emergency room can begin mobilizing the heart warn even before the patient is loaded into the ambulance.

“If it takes 20 minutes to come to the hospital, we’ve taken 20 minutes away from the door-to-balloon time to get your artery open,” Keller said.

“A few minutes here and a few minutes there all adds up,” said Matthew Cassavechia, director of emergency medical services. “This is a real-time situation. We hook up the 12lead EKG in the patient’s home or in the ambulance, make the cellular phone linkage and transmit it real time to the emergency department.”

Paramedics are also in radio contact with the emergency room to provide additional information about the patient’s age and medical history, he said.

All the ambulances are staffed with paramedics and equipped with cardiac monitors to perform the 12-lead EKG,” he said.

In its first year of interventional cardiology, the hospital treated about 500 heart patients, about 100 of them with potentially life-saving emergency representatives from the hospital said last month.

Copyright Westfair Communications Feb 12, 2007

(c) 2007 Fairfield County Business Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.