Heart Attack Diagnosis an Hour Faster With Ambulance Cell Phone

Ambulance workers using cell phones to send data to hospitals shaved an hour from heart attack victims' diagnosis time and got them on the operating table almost 40 minutes faster, according to a study.

The research, presented today at the Heart Rhythm Society's annual conference in San Francisco, is the first to document benefits of automated heart monitors, including Medtronic Inc.'s Lifepak 12, hooked to wireless phones, the authors said. Of 730 patients tracked, emergency workers using cell phones received heart test results an average of 20 minutes after a 911 call, compared with 78 minutes for those without phones.

More than 450,000 Americans die of heart attacks annually and paramedics' best chance to save someone is in the first minutes after a call for help, according to the American Heart Association. The Santa Cruz County, California, study should encourage emergency services providers, wary of costs for new equipment and training, to adopt the latest heart monitors that can use phones, said Barbara Drew, the lead author, in a telephone interview.

``We have a saying in nursing that time is muscle when it comes to heart attacks,'' said Drew, a nursing professor at the University of California, San Francisco. ``For every minute, more heart muscle dies and the patient either dies or they live with a broken heart.''

Most U.S. paramedics have had access for decades to portable electrocardiographs, machines that test and chart heart electrical activity for signs of heart attack, said Kent Benedict, Santa Cruz's medical director for emergency medical services.

Cost and Training

Less than half of U.S. government-run emergency services have the most modern versions of the machines because of their $15,000 to $20,000 price and the cost and difficulty of training workers to read them. Only modern electrocardiographs can use cell phones.

The study authors reprogrammed a Medtronic Lifepak 12 to scan a patient's data every 30 seconds for signs of heart attack. If the machine found something, it phoned a hospital computer through a cell phone.

``We have a very low-cost solution'' for emergency workers, Drew said. ``Our solution doesn't require paramedic training and retraining and quality control monitoring. The device does the work and gets the electrocardiogram to the experts at the hospital.''

The study, begun in 2003, showed that heart attack victims who were treated by paramedics using the cell phone technology reached hospital operating rooms in an average of 79 minutes, usually for an artery-clearing angioplasty or insertion of a stent. Without the cell phones, the process took 116 minutes, the study found.

Dead Zones

Researchers chose Santa Cruz, in central California, for its mix of rural and urban areas, mountains, beaches, farmland and cell-phone dead zones. The heart monitors were programmed to call back three times if they couldn't immediately connect with the hospital.

The study, funded by the U.S. government through the National Institutes of Health, is ongoing. Researchers are compiling statistics on how heart attack victims fared and expect to release that data next year.

``If you were to take these kinds of numbers that we're seeing in the study and look at other studies that have looked at heart attack survival, I have no doubt that we probably did save some lives,'' Benedict said.