Suburban is pilot for cell phone program

Hospital is trying to cut down on heart attack response time

The hospital is trying to shave minutes off its response times and ‘‘cutting through all the red tape that frequently occurs when patients come into the hospital,” according to Dr. Kenneth Kent, the hospital’s chief of cardiology.

An initiative to shorten heart attack response time launched about 18 months ago, after the American Heart Association issued a dictum that hospitals should get their ‘‘door-to-balloon” time — the time it takes to get a heart attack patient ‘‘on the table” for heart surgery — down to 90 minutes or less.

Research shows that after 90 minutes, a patient’s chance of survival diminishes greatly, according to Suburban doctors.

‘‘Evenings and weekends, when lots of the [catheterization lab] staff isn’t here, and cardiologists aren’t here, it’s hard to make that 90-minute mark,” said Dr. Brendan Carmody, emergency physician at Suburban.The hospital makes the 90-minute mark nearly 75 percent of the time, but wants to improve that rate, Carmody said.

When a Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service medic responds to a possible heart attack, the medic snaps a cell phone photo of the patient’s electrocardiogram from the ambulance. The medic sends the snapshot to a secured, password-protected e-mail address at the hospital. An emergency physician pulls up the photograph, analyzes it for characteristics of a condition needing a heart procedure, and makes phone calls to the cardiology and ‘‘cath lab” staff to come into the hospital immediately.

The goal is to get all Montgomery County hospitals on board with the program. Doctors and medics hope to equip all first responders with camera-enabled cell phones. Suburban has been running the pilot for a ‘‘few weeks to a month,” Carmody said.

Right now, the program is ‘‘almost exclusively” being tested at Suburban Hospital, although Shady Grove has shown interest, according to Chris Touzeau, master firefighter and medic for the county Fire and Rescue Service.

Touzeau had the idea for the cell phone transmissions while he was ‘‘looking for some way to do something today, instead of taking a long time to get things up and running” with high-tech EKG transmission equipment.

Touzeau has used the tactic in ‘‘a couple dozen” emergency cases so far.

The difference in response time is estimated from 10 to 30 minutes, according to Suburban.

The minutes are especially valuable ‘‘if the ambulance is 25 minutes away from hospital,” Carmody said.

The cell phone scheme has been in the works for about six or seven months, Kent said.

‘‘The cell phone is pretty simple, very cheap, and currently does have the possibility of getting just as high quality signal into the emergency room” as more expensive equipment, Kent said.

A comparable, but high-tech system, would take a bare minimum of $50,000 for six or seven medic units, Carmody said. All of the county’s medic units could be outfitted with cell phones for only $5,000, he said.

The result could be 10 to 20 minutes of time saved to treat a potentially fatal heart attack, doctors said.