CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital Improves Rural Cardiac Care with Pulsara (AHA Podcast Interview)

On August 15th, 2025, the American Hospital Association released an episode of their Advancing Health Podcast in which they interviewed Josh Neff, CEO of CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital in Durango, Colorado. Titled “Time is Tissue: How CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital is Revolutionizing Rural Cardiac Care,” the episode focused on CommonSpirit Mercy’s recent initiative to use Pulsara alongside local EMS agencies to better serve time-sensitive cardiac patients in their rural Four Corners region. You can listen to the full episode below or on the Advancing Health Podcast webpage.  

 

AHA Podcast Interview Highlights/Recap

In the interview, Neff shares with AHA host Tom Haederle the significant workflow and outcome improvements that his teams and partner organizations are already experiencing with the mobile-enabled communication platform.

“[Pulsara] allows those pre-hospital teams to transmit that ECG in a HIPAA compliant manner directly to the cardiologist on call,” Neff explained. “That also allows us to be more prepared if that patient is actually having a STEMI or a heart attack. It allows us to have our teams ready and prepared so that the patient goes directly to the cath lab and undergoes cardiac treatment in a shorter period of time.”

This doesn’t just save time for the patient at the hospital, it improves the care experience for EMS responders. Noting the benefits of the direct line of communication to the cardiologist, Neff said “it's really comforting for the team to know that they've got a group of specialists just at their fingertips that can help them care for that patient.”

When asked about the difficulty of implementing Pulsara in hospital workflows, Neff said “If you can operate your social media apps on your cell phone, you can understand and operate Pulsara. It is that simple. It's intuitive.”

Haederle then asked Neff about the budgetary concerns when adopting the platform, to which Neff noted, “it is not an overtly expensive investment. And it's an investment in clinical care and quality outcomes, so it made all the sense in the world for us to do it… I would say to any hospital CEO, as well as the EMS programs that are out there, it is an affordable program that you can easily integrate.”

“Since we've implemented Pulsara, we've been able to reduce that time from first medical contact to reperfusion from 130 minutes to 84 minutes. So we've seen a 35% decrease in time.”  - Josh Neff, CEO of CommonSprirt Mercy Hospital, Durango, CO

Though the initiative is relatively new, CommonSpirit Mercy is already recognizing the incredible benefits of their new workflow for their STEMI patients. “Since we've implemented Pulsara, we've been able to reduce that time from first medical contact to reperfusion from 130 minutes to 84 minutes,” Neff highlighted. “So we've seen a 35% decrease in time.”

For STEMI cases, treatment time is the dominant factor for both short-term and long-term patient outcomes—a common saying in cardiac care is “time is tissue”. While CommonSpirit Mercy is still gathering clinical data, Neff could say with confidence that “we're seeing patients with shorter hospital stays, getting back home, back to work, and back to play in a shorter amount of time. And we're seeing better outcomes clinically for them as well.”

For Josh Neff and his teams, improving patient outcomes in the Four Corners region means everything. “I know for sure that this technology is saving lives and impacting the people who live and work in my community, and that's important to me,” Neff said. “That's our role in this world—to make sure that we're taking great care of our community in a way that's meaningful—and this is just another tool in our toolbox that allows us to do that.”

To learn more, read about how CommonSpirit is using Pulsara to enhance patient care in their recent press release.