You may remember, back in March of 2014, CaptureProof won the crowdfunding competition hosted on Medstartr as part of the AHA Open Innovation Challenge – showing our backers saw CaptureProof’s potential to revolutionize communication in cardiology. All donations from this campaign went towards towards funding a year long clinical trial at University of North Carolina Medical Center showing the impact of medical media as a visual motivator for better health.
And now a few of those doctors from UNC’s Center for Heart and Vascular Care, Dr. Prashant Kaul and Dr. Sidney Smith were in the Wall Street Journal this week, highlighting their work as part of a 12-hospital-group looking to speed treatment and improve outcomes for patients who have a heart attack in the hospital.
The article, titled, A Hospital is no Place for a Heart Attack reveals an estimated 10,000 people a year have a heart attack in the hospital while being treated for illnesses such as cancer or pneumonia or undergoing a surgical procedure. A study by UNC researchers based on 62,000 patients at 303 hospitals in California – found that 34% of the in-hospital heart-attack patients died before they could be discharged. By comparison, there was a 9% fatality rate among people who showed up at the ER with heart-attack symptoms.
Dr. Smith and Dr. Kaul are addressing this head-on through 3 steps:
- Educate nurses on non-cardiac hospital units to recognize possible heart-attack symptoms
- Make sure an ECG is ordered immediately to check for S-T elevation; and
- Institute a system where a positive ECG immediately activates a rapid-response team to prepare a catheterization lab to treat a patient.
With these 3 steps these physicians and their teams are looking to improve healthcare outcomes for their patients. At CaptureProof we believe more data means better decisions and we salute all the physicians in this 12 hospital group who are working to improve education and communication in hospitals and collaborating on ways to improve care!