Paramedic with BC Emergency Health Services BC RESURECT, UBC Faculty of Medicine Vancouver, BC, Canada
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Disclosure(s):
Jacob Hutton, PhD(c): No financial relationships to disclose
Summary: What if we could eliminate unwitnessed cardiac arrest using biosensor technologies? Research from a cardiac arrest registry in Canada will be presented examining how many lives can be saved leveraging innovations in wearable sensors.
Synopsis: In spite of investments in community CPR awareness and Public Access to Defibrillation programs, survival following cardiac arrest remains low. A major determinant in survival following cardiac arrest is the presence of a bystander witness. Previous research has shown that bystander-witnessed cases are more likely to survive to hospital discharge and experience more desirable long-term outcomes. However, the majority of cardiac arrest cases are unwitnessed, with survival in this group extremely low. We conducted a modelling and simulation study to estimate how the use of biosensor technologies may impact cardiac arrest survival in the future by increasing recognition of cardiac arrest and alerting emergency responders. Our work demonstrates that the potential number of survivors to hospital discharge may be radically increased through the use of these technologies, even if no additional cases receive bystander CPR. Implications for future innovations will be discussed, including transforming the response to cardiac arrest through the integration of biosensor technologies with current solutions in crowdsourced CPR and rapid AED delivery programs.
Learning Objectives:
Cardiac arrest survival can be radically improved by focusing on increasing recognition only, even if no additional patients receive bystander CPR or an AED.
Biosensor technologies are capable of cardiac arrest detection and their implementation in the population has the potential to more than double the survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest.
This presentation will include components of a high quality collaborative cardiovascular and resuscitation program in a dispatch, EMS and / or healthcare system that has demonstrated improvement in survival from SCA.
