Everyone needs to remember when it comes to heart attack, time is muscle. If you are feeling chest pain, don’t hesitate to call 9-1-1.

Our heart teams at Mount Sinai know that improving heart attack patient survival is all about teamwork and timing. The team includes the dispatchers, paramedics, FDNY, hospital teams, emergency room staff, and interventional cardiologists who are working together to reduce wait times in emergency rooms and speed communication to get a patient to the catheterization laboratory as fast as possible to open a blocked heart artery. The goal timing is for less than 90 minutes.

New research is showing that a faster, coordinated emergency response in collaboration with hospital cardiac catheterization laboratories in New York City and beyond is associated with improving patient survival from a heart attack caused by a sudden, completely blocked artery called an ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI).

Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, Mount Sinai Roosevelt, The Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and Mount Sinai Queens were part of a 484-hospital, 16-region effort funded by the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Regional Systems of Care Demonstration Project: Mission: Lifeline STEMI ACCELERATOR. The project tracked the care of more than 24,000 heart attack patients between 2012 and 2014 after implementing universal treatment protocols, data collection system, measurement, and feedback to rapidly diagnose and treat heart attack patients.

This new collaboration is creating faster response for patients experiencing a STEMI heart attack that occurs when a vessel supplying blood to the heart is suddenly and completely blocked. Quickly opening the blocked artery can restore normal blood flow and minimize heart damage.

In NYC it usually takes 55 to 60 minutes for a STEMI heart attack patient who arrives to the emergency room to have their blocked artery opened in the catheterization laboratory. As a result of this AHA project, the time it takes for the opening of a blocked STEMI artery for patients going directly to the catheterization laboratory, bypassing the emergency room, has been accomplished in less than 30 minutes after their arrival to the hospital.

One of our greatest achievements was to create a protocol to send eligible patients with heart attacks directly from the ambulance to the catheterization laboratory without first stopping for their examination in the emergency room.

This has been very successful as a result of direct communication between the FDNY, the hospitals, and the new agreed upon protocol that certain patients should go immediately to the catheterization laboratory.

Remember, don’t wait. Call 9-1-1 if you think you are experiencing a heart attack.

Timing is everything.

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Jacqueline Tamis-Holland, MD, is an interventional cardiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai Roosevelt and Co-Director of Women’s Heart NY. She serves as Assistant Professor of Medicine, Cardiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and is a member of the Executive Committee for New York City’s Mission Lifeline STEMI ACCELERATOR program.

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