Hospitals uniting to speed up care to save more heart-attack patients

CHICAGO — Hundreds of hospitals around the country are joining the most ambitious project ever undertaken to give faster emergency-room care to people suffering major heart attacks.

Fewer than one-third of such patients now get their blocked arteries reopened within 90 minutes of arrival, as guidelines recommend. The risk of dying goes up by 42 percent if care is delayed by even half an hour longer.

"There's a very, very large opportunity here to improve patient care," said Dr. John Brush, a Norfolk, Va., heart specialist who helped the American College of Cardiology design the new project, which is to be launched today at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago.

Jim Kern, 47, of Norfolk, experienced both extremes. When he had his first heart attack, on Aug. 22, he endured excruciating pain while filling out mundane paperwork and waiting as triage nurses changed shifts. It took nearly four hours to get proper care.

When he had a second attack on Oct. 30 — after the hospital adopted new rapid-care measures — doctors "were there within 15 minutes of the time I hit the door and were already starting to do the prep," Kern said. "The attention and everything I was given was a difference of day and night."

Major medical groups and government agencies have endorsed the project, including the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

It targets heart attacks caused by a total or near-total blockage of a major artery that prevents enough oxygen from reaching the heart tissue. About a third of the 865,000 heart attacks in the United States each year and 10 million worldwide are of this type.

The preferred remedy is angioplasty, in which doctors snake a tube through a blood vessel in the groin to the blockage. A tiny balloon is inflated to flatten the blockage, and a mesh scaffold called a stent usually is inserted to prop the artery open.

Guidelines have long called for a "door-to-balloon" time of 90 minutes, "but we just haven't engineered our emergency rooms to cut out some of these steps that aren't needed" and cause delays, Nabel said.

Hospitals now are wasting too much time summoning too many people to consult on a case before starting treatment, said Yale University researcher Elizabeth Bradley, who along with Dr. Harlan Krumholz surveyed 365 hospitals to determine measures that consistently helped heart-attack patients get quick treatment.

"Our recommendation is to allow the emergency-room physician to decide" and assemble a team, "and they should be able to do it with one single call."

Study results were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine and will appear in its Nov. 30 print edition.

About 1,250 of the 5,000 hospitals in the United States perform emergency angioplasties and are being invited to join the campaign. Dozens of hospitals in Europe and North and South America also have expressed interest.

"We want to take the level of performance that is now only exhibited by a minority of hospitals and make it what is found everywhere," Krumholz said.