Multi-vendor solution for reception and review of ECGs to shorten treatment delay in AMI patients

To provide optimal pre-hospital acute myocardial infarct (AMI) care, a system has been developed to receive ECGs from (ambulance) defibrillators from different manufacturers, and from ECG equipment in other hospitals or community medical centers. ECGs are sent as FAX to a special network-FAX, which forwards the received FAX (ECG) as E-mail attachment to a dedicated mailbox on the LUMC Microsoft Exchange mail server. Cardiologists and CCU nurses can view these e-mail messages (and thus the ECGs) to determine patient´s eligibility for primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), based on predefined criteria. If necessary the cardiologist on-call can view the ECG either in or outside the LUMC by logging on to the LUMC mail system. Between November 2004 and April 2005 ECGs from 209 patients (mean age: 62.3 yr, range 26-91 yr; 77.8% male) have been sent to the LUMC using this setup (136 ECGs from Medtronic defibrillators, 63 from Zoll defibrillators, 10 other)