Montreal hospitals speed-up time-to-table for heart attack patients

nichannel” alerts sequentially, ensuring that all team members receive the message. These channels include critical alert push-notification technology, SMS, phone calls, and pagers for those who still wish to use them.

Cath lab teams typically consist of an interventional cardiologist, nurses and X-ray technologists. Additionally, there are downstream professionals who must be alerted, as well, including nurse resource managers, bed flow managers, and the coronary care unit who arrange the care for patients after the procedure is completed, as well as cardiology residents and fellows.

Dr. Spaziano stressed that, “We optimize for a 90-minute window to get the heart attack patient from the Emergency Department to the cath lab table with the artery unblocked.”

In a blog, he writes, “For patients in whom the culprit artery is opened within 90 minutes, the risk of death is as low as 4 percent. However, in those for whom it takes over 90 minutes to unblock the culprit artery, the risk of death increases to over 12 percent. And in those with a delay of over 150 minutes, the risk of death is as high as 20 percent. That’s one in five patients.”

Stenoa has been deployed at the MUHC and Royal Victoria Hospital for about a year-and-a-half and has been used with more than 500 heart attack patients. It’s been so successful in speeding up the process of getting coronary patients into the cath lab that plans are in the works to roll it out to other Quebec hospitals.

Dr. Levett founded Stenoa as a medical student. He and his colleagues, including Dr. Spaziano, realized that an electronic, real-time system could dramatically reduce the time needed to assemble highly skilled teams.

“It was built to meet the needs that we see every day in the hospital,” said Dr. Levett.

They started development in 2021 and it was first used at MUHC in September of 2021. It runs in the cloud, using AWS, and has unique features built into the platform.

First, it has ECG integration capabilities, so when a patient’s ECG is read by the Stenoa system, it automatically extracts patient demographics and relevant time components. This data can be transmitted