Pulsara Blog

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center is the first hospital on the west coast to use the healthcare communication platform, Pulsara, and the first in the nation to use the company's Prehospital Alerting Package.

BOZEMAN, MT -- SEPTEMBER 12, 2017 -- Stroke is a leading cause of disability and death in the U.S., with close to 800,000 cases each year. The outcome can be devastating, and every delay in care impacts a stroke survivor’s chance at a full recovery. To minimize those delays and make emergency communication more efficient, PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver, Washington, has partnered with several local EMS services to begin using the healthcare communication platform, Pulsara.

PeaceHealth Southwest is the first hospital on the west coast to use Pulsara for STEMI and stroke communications both with EMS and within the hospital, and the first in the nation to use the company's Prehospital Alerting Package for all EMS-transferred patients.

Healthcare systems must continue to adopt mobile-friendly platforms to meet users' expectations and offer high-quality care.

Many industries have overhauled their businesses to meet consumers’ expectations of using their mobile devices to do everything from checking in for a flight to ordering takeout food. The healthcare industry has been slower to adopt mobile-friendly platforms, but it is increasingly doing so to meet patients’ and health professionals’ needs. But simply taking current methods of communication and putting them on smartphones is not sufficient — platforms must capitalize on the many advantages mobile technology offers in order to truly transform and improve healthcare.

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

Physician collaboration is associated with fewer patient deaths, readmissions, and emergency room visits.

A study of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) found that when physicians collaborated more, patients had a 24 percent lower rate of emergency room visits and hospital readmissions, and a 28 percent lower rate of death.[10]

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

Physician groups that worked more closely together in caring for patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures were able to produce better patient outcomes, according to recent research.[11] The study examined claims data for 251,630 patients who underwent CABG between 2008 and 2011; the patients received care from 466,243 physicians across more than a thousand health systems. At 60 days post-procedure, patients treated by physician teams with higher levels of cooperation had:

Communication and operational changes at hospitals, and within EMS systems, play key role in recent drop in the death rate from heart attacks. 

Although heart disease is still the number one killer of American adults, in recent years the nation has witnessed a dramatic decrease in the death rate from heart attacks. From 2003 to 2013, the rate at which people in the U.S. died from heart disease dropped 38%.[7]

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

This striking improvement can be attributed to a number of factors, including more effective treatments for heart disease and risk factors like high cholesterol and high blood pressure. In addition, fewer people are smoking these days. And notably, some hospitals have made sweeping changes in how they treat people having heart attacks. Many of those changes have not involved new drug therapies or procedures, but simply operational shifts that address patient flow and provider communication.

Research suggests that medical errors play an even bigger role in preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals than previously estimated, and 80 percent of all serious medical errors involve miscommunication. That amounts to 250,000 - 400,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Tools that help medical professionals communicate more quickly, accurately, and collaboratively are critical to saving lives. 

More than fifteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on the incidence of medical errors in U.S. hospitals. The report suggested as many as 98,000 people die every year from medical errors.[1] Recent analysis from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says that report may have significantly underestimated the problem, putting the actual number closer to 250,000 - 400,000.[2] In fact, medical error is now considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

Knowing how and when to use these devices could save lives.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following content originally appeared on EMS1.com as paid content sponsored by Pulsara. Special thanks to our guest blogger, Drew Rinella for EMS1 BrandFocus. Drew is the clinical coordinator for Bonner County EMS in rural North Idaho. He is a paramedic, public servant, and competition shooter. Drew is an advocate for quality in EMS and also blogs his crusade against bad EKGs in product advertising. 

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Automatic CPR devices have been available for several decades now, yet they haven’t received widespread acceptance as the standard of care for cardiac arrest management. Here are 10 things you need to know about automatic CPR devices:

As an emergency room physician, I experience firsthand the impact of outdated communication systems — how they hamper good patient care and challenge even the most talented, dedicated, and well-trained medical professionals. In emergency situations, when seconds count, fast and accurate communication between care teams can mean the difference between life and death.

Pulsara was featured last week in a news article on Australian news site, The Courier after Ballarat Base Hospital, Pulsara's second international hospital client, began a pilot of the platform. Ballarat will leverage Pulsara to receive real-time information about a patient’s condition from local paramedics to get the entire emergency department, cardiac, neurology and other specialists and departments on the same page.

Using the Pulsara app, a Cincinnati-area health care system significantly cut down its time to treatment for cardiac cases.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following content originally appeared on EMS1.com as paid content sponsored by Pulsara. Special thanks to our guest bloggers, the EMS1 BrandFocus Staff. 

A new testing method may be able to quickly rule out acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in patients presenting to the ED with chest pain. Research suggests that combining an ECG with a high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hs-cTnT) test below the level of detection can identify those patients at sufficiently low risk for AMI, allowing them to be released to outpatient care sooner.

The findings of the meta-analysis were reported online in Annals of Internal Medicine on April 17, 2017. The study authors point out that a second test should be repeated approximately 3 hours after initial onset of symptoms, since troponin is not always detectable in circulation of patients who arrive quickly after onset of pain.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

St. Elizabeth Healthcare, in Edgewood, Kentucky, decreased the time to treat critical heart attack patients by 30 percent.

Edgewood, KY – Mar. 30, 2017 – In the past year, St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Edgewood, Kentucky, significantly decreased the time-to-treatment for heart attack patients, following an effort by stakeholders from every part of the care team to collaborate and improve processes that speed up care. This improvement was due also in part to the use of a mobile app, Pulsara, which puts timely, clear information in the hands of everyone responsible for caring for the patient, both inside and outside of the hospital.

For patients who arrived at St. Elizabeth Edgewood via ambulance, the average time from first medical contact (FMC) — defined as the moment emergency medical services (EMS) first arrives at the patient’s side — to the administration of artery-opening treatment in the hospital dropped 30 percent, from 103 minutes in the first quarter of 2016 to 72 minutes in January 2017. The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends aiming for a time-to-treatment of less than 90 minutes because it has been associated with better outcomes for heart attack patients.

Time is critical in the ability to care efficiently and effectively for patients, especially for STEMI cases. To remain viable in today’s cost-and-quality focused healthcare environment, hospitals must strive to achieve best practice patient care (or exceed such measures) while demonstrating strong clinical competencies for top results at the lowest operational cost. Meanwhile, technology and treatment advances are also changing the way patient care is provided and streamlined, including care from prehospital entry through discharge.

Editor's Note: The following excerpt originally appeared on the Healthcare Informatics website on March 7, 2017, and the article can be read in its entirety here. Pulsara is humbled by the incredible care teams in Colorado Springs who are tirelessly working and innovating to provide the best possible care for their community. A vision without action is worth very little. It is the hard work and dedication of these teams that is truly making the difference in acute care and in the lives of patients.

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Hospital physicians and nurses know all too well that time can make a difference when treating patients suffering from a heart attack or stroke. Unfortunately, gaps in communication between emergency responders and hospital staff is a persistent and common problem and can slow down the process of getting accurate, pertinent patient information from the field, such as the emergency medical technicians and paramedics on the scene, to the hospital staff.

To tackle these challenges, hospitals from two different health systems have partnered with each other and with a dozen local emergency medical services (EMS) agencies to use mobile technology to coordinate their care teams to accelerate time to treatment for critical care patients and to provide better care for stroke and heart attack patients.

Why do we do what we do?

At Pulsara, our "WHY" is to empower TEAMS of caregivers to come together and achieve the best possible outcomes for critical patients as quickly as possible, and with reduced miscommunications and errors.

As clinicians, our "WHY" is to make a difference in the lives of all the patients and their families we touch.

For Pulsara staff and clinicians alike, our "WHY" is also to influence change where change is gravely needed. To move the needle and find new, better ways of treating patients.

One team has truly embraced this mission. The health system in Victoria, Australia, including the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, recently revealed an incredible telemedicine success story:

Happy Heart Month!

As common as heart attacks are, there are some misperceptions around who is vulnerable. I suppose we've asked for it through over-dramatization in the movies. We've all watched the scene where the middle-aged man suddenly clutches his chest, breaks out in a sweat, and then keels over. And he usually has some stereotypical characteristics: beer belly, sedentary lifestyle, a love for all things greasy ... but I can't think of a single movie scene where a woman is the one clutching her chest. I believe that this is concerning given the fact that heart disease is the number one killer of women in America. And these misconceptions are reinforced outside of Hollywood too. In fact, if you Google just the words "heart month" the number one result -- from the CDC -- is all about men. 

When the concept for EMS was born nearly 50 years ago, it was meant to be an integrated part of a smooth system of care beginning with the call to EMS dispatch and continuing through to definitive treatment. However, EMS-to-hospital communications have faced significant barriers including miscommunications due to archaic and unreliable technologies, issues transmitting ECGs and other patient data, inadequate training in STEMI recognition, and lack of access to patient outcome information for EMS. According to an article published in JEMS this week, recent studies have shown that prehospital notification by EMS improves time to treatment for stroke, however these notifications are not part of a consistent and standardized protocol, and in 25% of cases, EMS fails to alert the hospital of an incoming stroke patient.