A team from King’s College Hospital and King’s College London has developed a prototype of a mobile app to help paramedics triage patients suffering a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital.
They were working with a team from technology consultancy Ensono Digital at a Microsoft hackathon to create a prototype for assessing the risk of brain damage.
The app uses a neurological risk score from an algorithm known as MIRACLE2, developed from a research programme funded by Heart Research UK and which can supply information to healthcare professionals to personalise treatment of the patient.
The next steps will involve circulating the tool with cardiologists at King’s College Hospital for user feedback and looking to further continue the app’s development.
Ensono indicated that it could be possible to add information such as ECG scores and heart rhythms to the app.
Long time concerns
Dr Nilesh Pareek, consultant intervention cardiologist at King’s College Hospital and adjunct senior lecturer at King’s College London, commented: “For a long time, I have been concerned about the poor outcomes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. In that critical first 72 hours after an incident, care currently looks very similar for most patients, potentially missing the chance for vital investigations into the wider impacts of cardiac arrests on the human body.
“That is why this app, and its ability to personalise care for patients, is so exciting. It is there to potentially support the decision making of every healthcare professional, from the paramedics who first treat a cardiac arrest patient to the clinicians who receive them at the hospital.
“Care in the future might be shaped to the patient’s needs: someone with a high risk of a poor neurological outcome, for example, might be treated with targeted and rapid intervention to reduce damage to the brain.
“Of course, there is more value we can add to the application, but we’re now one step closer to realising how this initiative can deliver better patient outcomes for the UK healthcare system.”
Ensono said that in the UK the probability of surviving an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is approximately 10%, while in some other countries such as Denmark it is as high as 20%.
