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COLUMBUS, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- For the most dangerous type of heart attack, a few minutes can make the difference between death and a full recovery. A new alert system is putting hospital staff in motion to save critical time and lives.
You'd typically find paramedic Tim Davis on a hospital run, but two years ago he was in a stretcher in the back of the ambulance.
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"I realized what was going on [and I] didn't want to admit it," Davis recalled to Ivanhoe. "I found out that chest pain is probably the worst pain you could ever have."
Davis was having a severe heart attack known as ST elevated myocardial infarction or STEMI. Blood flow to his heart was completely blocked.
"Your whole goal is to limit the amount of time that the heart is without appropriate blood flow," Douglas Van Fossen, M.D., a cardiologist at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, explained to Ivanhoe.
A balloon angioplasty to open the artery can cut the risk of dying by 40 percent if it's done within ninety minutes of when the patient gets to the hospital. New STEMIAlert systems speed up the process.
"Now our average time is somewhere between 54 and 58 minutes door to balloon to get that patient fixed," Dr. Van Fossen said.
The alert signals to the entire emergency team a critical heart attack patient is arriving. Before they were notified one at a time.
"The ER was notified," Dr. Van Fossen explained. "They then notified the cardiologist who then notified the cath lab who then notified other members of the team."
Yale researchers found having a single call or page to activate the catheterization lab can save almost 14 minutes -- time that means everything to people like Davis.
"Had they not had those policies in place there's no way that I would have been able to walk out of there without some sort of heart damage," he said.
Davis is healthy and back on the job, working hard to help the next patient beat the clock.
Some hospitals are educating EMS personnel to identify the most critical kinds of heart attacks in the field. The goal is to activate the alert system before the patient gets to the hospital.
For additional research on this article, click here.
To read Ivanhoe's full-length interview with Dr. Van Fossen, click here.
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If this story or any other Ivanhoe story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Melissa Medalie at mmedalie@ivanhoe.com.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Christina Fitzer, Communications & Media Relations Associate
Riverside Methodist Hospital
(614) 566-4517
cfitzer@ohiohealth.com
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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