Hospitals speed-up time-to-table for heart attacks

BY JERRY ZEIDENBERG

MONTREAL – The McGill University Health Centre, along with the Royal Victoria Hospital, have deployed a real-time care coordination platform called Stenoa (https://stenoa.com) that quickly pulls together the team members needed in the cardiac catheterization laboratory when a patient presents with a heart attack.

“The diagnosis can be confirmed and the entire team can be alerted almost instantly,” said Dr. Jeremy Levett, the founder and chief executive officer of Stenoa and a cardiac surgery resident at the MUHC. “Before, the process of confirming the diagnosis of an acute myocardial infarction and activating the team could take anywhere between 1025 minutes.”

And in critical-care situations like an acute myocardial infarction, every second counts.

“Some patients do pass away on the table,” said Dr. Marco Spaziano, Stenoa’s chief medical officer and an interventional cardiologist at the MUHC. “There are cases each year where we say, ‘If only the patient had been here five minutes earlier, we may have been able to save them.’ This is a lifeor-death issue for many patients.”

Using the Stenoa platform, a paramedic on the way to the hospital or an Emergency Department physician can activate the system within the ambulance or from a shared device in the Emergency Department. That consults the interventional cardiologist on call and gets the whole team in motion, ready for the arrival of the patient.

That also contrasts with the outdated and manual process in many hospitals in Quebec and across Canada. Traditionally, they have gone through a back-and-forth process using locating personnel and text messages whereby information was shared non-securely, and activations were subject to human error and lots of manual intervention.

For its part, Stenoa sends out its “om-

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