Effect of emergency department in-hospital tele-electrocardiographic triage and interventional cardiologist activation of the infarct team on door-to-balloon times in ST-segment-elevation acute myocardial infarction.

Current guidelines recommend that >75% of patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) receive primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) within 90 minutes. The goal has been hardly achievable, so we conducted a 2-year before-and-after study to determine the impact of emergency department (ED) tele-electrocardiographic (tele-ECG) triage and interventional cardiologist activation of the infarct team at door-to-balloon time (D2BT) and the proportion of patients undergoing PPCI within 90 minutes since arrival. In total 105 consecutive patients with acute STEMI (mean age 62 ± 13 years, 82% men) were studied, 54 before and 51 after the change in protocol. The 51patients in the tele-ECG group underwent tele-electrocardiography at the ED and electrocardiograms were transmitted to a third-generation mobile telephone of an on-call interventional cardiologist within 10 minutes of ED arrival. The infarct team was activated and PPCI was performed by the interventional cardiologist. Fifty-four patients with acute STEMI who underwent PPCI in the year before implementation of tele-electrocardiography served as control subjects. Median D2BT of the tele-ECG group was 86 minutes, significantly shorter than the median time of 125 minutes of the control group (p <0.0001). The proportion of patients who achieved a D2BT <90 minutes increased from 44% in the control group to 76% in the tele-ECG group (p = 0.0001). In conclusion, implementation of ED tele-ECG triage and interventional cardiologist activation of the infarct team can significantly shorten D2BT and result in a larger proportion of patients achieving guideline recommendations.