Christmas came early for a 95-year-old Hermosa Beach woman who received life-saving treatment for a myocardial infarction heart attack faster than previously possible, through a new system allowing emergency physicians to see her EKG data at a medical center even as firefighter-paramedics were treating her on the scene.
Technological upgrades, purchased by Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance, allow firefighter-paramedics to hook 12 lead cables from a heart monitor onto a stricken victim, and then use blue tooth to transmit 12 “views” of the heart – in the form of an electrocardiogram’s squiggly lines – to emergency physicians. An email is then received at the medical center with the same EKG squiggles the paramedics are seeing.
As a result, when paramedics in a moving ambulance and physicians at the medical center diagnose a myocardial infarction heart attack, medical personnel can be activated at a catheter lab inside the medical center, to await the patient’s arrival and perform a vessel-opening angioplasty as quickly as possible.
Within 12 hours of receiving new cell phones and upgrades to their heart monitors, Hermosa firefighter-paramedics put the new system to good use.
“We had a cardiac event, and the patient was presenting with atypical signs. We looked at her heart rhythm, and sent a transmission, and when we got to the hospital the cath lab team had already been activated,” said firefighter-paramedic Steve Ramirez.
“A 95-year-old woman was up and walking around, and she was released about a day later,” he said.
“Time is heart muscle,” said registered nurse Kristina Crews, pre-hospital care coordinator for the medical center, who is credited with spearheading the program. “The longer the vessel is blocked, the more damage is done.”
In addition to the quicker responses, the upgrade helps to prevent unnecessary activation of a catheter lab team by adding the ability to reconfirm the diagnoses made in the field.
Before the upgrades, paramedics would hook a patient to an EKG on the way to the hospital, using an onboard monitor to interpret the data and determine whether the patient was having a myocardial infarction. The onboard monitors are not as sensitive to the early stages of a myocardial infarction, and the diagnoses were less certain.
“The new technology now allows the emergency department physician to see the EKG as if the patient were in front of him,” said physician Fred Carr, medical co-director of the medical center’s emergency department.
“Before, we relied on a monitor reading from the field that was incorrect about 20 percent of the time. Now we can more easily diagnose [myocardial infarctions] in the field and save time by activating the cardiac cath team before the patient arrives. Every minute saved leads to less heart damage and a better recovery for our patients.”
The medical center spent about $25,000 for phones, two-year communication packages, and cardiac monitor upgrades for the fire departments in the beach cities, Torrance and El Segundo.
“All the paramedics involved were really enthusiastic about providing an even higher level of care to the community,” Crews said. “Every single department was really on board.” ER
