Prairie Stat Heart Program
Prairie Stat Heart Program
Passavant is part of a special cardiac care program called the Prairie Stat Heart Program that identifies, treats, and transfers acute heart attack patients to a cardiac cath lab within 90 minutes of arriving in the Emergency Department. Stat Heart is a collaborative effort between Passavant and the Prairie Care Alliance (a collaborative of Springfield’s cardiologists and hospitals). Seven other rural hospitals participate in Stat Heart.
Once the Passavant Emergency Department physician identifies an acute heart attack patient, the Stat Heart team is activated and transport by helicopter is arranged for the patient. The Prairie cardiologist and the receiving Springfield hospital are alerted and the Prairie Stat Heart team is activated. All activity occurs within a very short time so the patient arrives in the cardiac cath lab in 90 minutes or less—which is even faster than many metropolitan hospitals.
Passavant has a unique advantage with its Stat Heart patients. Three of the advanced life support agencies that transport patients are equipped to send an EKG (electrocardiogram is a recording of the electrical activity of the heart) from the field back to Passavant. This decreases wait time in the Emergency Department and speeds up the Stat Heart process.
The November 30, 2006, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine cited programs like the Stat Heart Program as a model for national standards. In the two years it has been in place, Stat Heart has treated 184 rural patients, and 60 percent of those patients had their blocked arteries reopened within 90 minutes of arrival at a Springfield hospital, compared with 15 percent for rural patients nationwide.
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