a presentation earlier today at the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2013 meeting<\/a> in Baltimore, faculty and students at the University of Virginia discussed an iPhone app they designed to overcome some of the limitations of the current system. The iPhone app takes a photo of the ECG, reduces its size, and transmits the image over a standard cell phone network to a secure server. The image can then be viewed at the receiving hospital by physicians qualified to read an ECG.<\/p>\nThe researchers tested the app more than 1,500 times over different cell phone networks. The app was consistently faster than the traditional method, transmitting images in 4-6 seconds, compared to 38-114 seconds for an actual-size email image and 17-48 seconds for a large email image. “The app was significantly faster, exhibited substantially less standard deviation, and had less than a 0.5% failure rate at 120 seconds, compared to failure rates of 3%, 71.2%, and 15.5% for full-sized photos on the three networks,” the authors reported. They are now testing the app in rural areas with limited cell-phone access.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimple cellular technology can save lives,\u201d said David R. Burt, lead author of the study, in a press release from the AHA. \u201cThis system may make pre-hospital ECG transmission a more inexpensive and reliable option. That can translate to faster treatment and saved lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
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In the crucial early stages of a possible myocardial infarction (MI), EMTs on the scene now rely on slow and unreliable proprietary technology to transmit vital ECG data to physicians at a hospital for evaluation. But a new iPhone app using standard cell phone networks may help speed the process and, ultimately, cut delays in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,9],"tags":[1823,874,1822,1171,245,257],"class_list":["post-36739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-interventional-cardiology","tag-emts","tag-hospital-delays","tag-iphone","tag-iphone-app","tag-mi","tag-stemi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/b-i.forbesimg.com\/larryhusten\/files\/2013\/05\/iPhone-ECG-app.jpg\")
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