June 11, 2010

Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City has incorporated new technology that sends electrocardiogram (ECG) information from chest pain patients to the hospital while the patient is still en route in the ambulance.

Use of a new technology, called the Lifenet System, could shave up to 10 minutes off the process of getting a patient from the emergency room door to the cardiac catheterization lab and in one recent case at Sequoia it saved seven minutes, a Sequoia representative said. The ECG contains information that can determine if the patient is having an actual heart attack and doctors and nurses can be prepared and have the catheterization lab ready to go, said Kathy Romano, Chief Operating Officer for Sequoia.

“I’m quite certain it will save lives,” she said “The saying in cardiology is ‘time is muscle.’” And the more heart muscle saved the better the outcome for the patient.

Sequoia not only had to train its own staff but the ambulance companies’ staff as well, Romano said. She said the technology wasn’t terribly expensive, but the process was technologically complex.

Before it implemented Lifenet, Sequoia had one of the fastest “door-to-flow” times in the state meaning from the time the patient enters the hospital to when blood flow is restored to the heart. Sequoia’s average “door-to-flow” time was 61 minutes. Now it expects to take up to an additional 10 minutes off that time.

The Lifenet system is made by Physio-Control, a division of Medtronic Inc., and is located in Redmond, Wash. Lifenet is specifically designed to reduce the treatment time for patients who experience a form of heart attack called STEMI (ST elevation myocardial infarction), one of the most serious types of heart attack. The American Heart Association reports that almost 400,000 people in the U.S. suffer STEMI annually.

The Journal of the American College of Cardiology reported in 2006 that the death rate in cases of acute cardiac events rose 40 percent if the time from entering the hospital to restoring blood flow to the heart increased from 90 minutes to 120 minutes.

Before Lifenet Sequoia had worked on saving minutes between the hospital door to the ECG, between the ECG to the catheterization lab and from catheterization to opening up the blood vessel.

“Now what we’ve done is tremendously shortened the time from our door to the cath lab,” Romano said.