A study shows that though hospitals have reduced the time of their treatment plan for heart attack patients, they haven’t saved more lives. The result of the study left some of the country’s leading cardiovascular experts astounded.
Better implementation of hospitals heart attack treatments has now become the basis of Medicare payments and a key measure to define a hospital’s quality.
The participants involved in this study are patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction, a type of heart attack that is life-threatening emergency case wherein an artery on the heart becomes completely blocked.
Daniel Menees, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan said doctors need to unblock arteries and allow blood flow to prevent the heart muscle from dying.
"We're shaving off the last 10, 20 or 30 minutes" between heart attack and treatment, said Hitinder Gurm, an associate professor at the University of Michigan to USA Today.. "But the total time that the artery has been blocked has not changed much. We need to move upstream. We need to get patients to recognize their symptoms faster and get to the hospital sooner."
Treatments usually include clot-busting drugs but experts now believe that cardiac catheterization is the best option.
Between 2005 and 2006 to 2008 and 2009, hospitals have reduced their treatment time from 83 minutes to 67 minutes. Analysts also attested that in 97,000 hospital admissions, the percentage of heart attack patients who received the treatment in 90 minutes or less increased from 60 percent of the study to 83 percent years after three years.
Several hospitals have activated emergency response teams now to deal with various heart emergencies. One-third of these response teams have responded to false alarms.
It also important that patients are familiar of the warning signs that they are soon to have a heart attack. Some of the signs are chest pain, arm pain, and shortness of breath.
The study was published in the Sept. 4 issue of the online journal New England Journal of Medicine.
