Heart attack patients were able to get life-saving treatment faster after medical teams at different hospitals communicated via a smartphone app, a South Korean study has found.
A research letter published in the latest edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology followed patients with ST-elevated myocardial infarction, or STEMI, who needed to be transferred to undergo percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
The team found that patients had the procedure an average of 27 minutes faster when medical teams used a smartphone app-based social network system to co-ordinate the hospital transfer compared with teams who used a non-smartphone based STEMI hotline.
The benefit of the smartphone app was particularly noticed at nights and weekends, when on-call medical teams were more likely to have been off site and had to travel to the hospital to perform the PCI.
Dr Joo Park, assistant professor of internal medicine at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, South Korea, which carried out the research, said: “Social network system activation is a simple and cost-effective method suitable for broad utilisation and implementation among health care providers to reduce the total ischemic time for transferred STEMI patients.
“In my opinion, social network system activation can potentially save lives without using new resources in the health care system.”
The research team connected health care providers at five non-PCI equipped hospitals with providers at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, which has around-the-clock PCI capabilities, via a smartphone application known as BAND, a popular social networking app in South Korea that facilitates communication among groups.
When transferring a STEMI patient to the hospital, physicians used the app to send basic patient information and a photo of the patient’s electrocardiogram taken with a smartphone camera. The interventional cardiologist used the information to gather a team to perform PCI, paging on-call personnel when needed, often before the transfer patient arrived at the emergency department.
The study followed 114 STEMI patients who were transferred to Seoul National University Bundang Hospital over an 18-month period, 50 of whom were transferred using the SNS app, with the remaining 64 being transferred using a non-smartphone based STEMI hotline.
When SNS was used, there was an average 27-minute reduction in the length of time from first medical contact to receiving PCI.
“Transferred STEMI patients rarely achieve timely reperfusion due to delays in the transfer process, especially when transferred during off-hours,” said Dr Park.
“The use of a smartphone SNS can help to achieve timely reperfusion for transferred STEMI patients with rapid, seamless communication among health care providers.”
Park JJ, Yoon CH, Suh JW et al. Reduction of Ischemic Time for Transferred STEMI Patients Using a Smartphone Social Network System. J ACC 19 September 2016; doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2016.07.733
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