Five years ago the treatment time it took to attend to cardiac ailments was way behind what the standard calls for. However, this has greatly improved and now more than 90% of U.S. heart attack patients who required emergency angioplasty to open blocked coronary arteries received the treatment within the recommended time in 2010. Five years past the rate was a low 44%.

In 2010, 91% of the patients were treated within 90 minutes of arrival at the hospital, compared with 44% in 2005. Seventy percent of patients were treated within 75 minutes in 2010, compared with 27% in 2005.

The median time from hospital admission to emergency angioplasty fell from 96 minutes to 64 minutes over the study period.

Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine and epidemiology and public health at Yale University School of Medicine commented:

“Everybody had to improve to get a national report card like this. This remarkable improvement demonstrates what we can achieve when we work together and is a tribute to the doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals that applied the information from the research studies about how best to deliver care to ensure that patients are treated rapidly.”

Time is of the essence when it comes to healthcare. For example, angioplasty, a process in which a thin, balloon-tipped catheter is inserted into the blocked blood vessel to restore blood flow, needs to be performed as quickly as possible on these patients, preferably within 90 minutes of hospital arrival, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).

Dr. James Slater, director of the Cardiac Catheterization Lab at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City continues:

“This remarkable study shows a dramatic improvement in the delivery of high quality health care on a nationwide basis for a specific, very serious acute medical condition. A complicated process of opening the cardiac cath lab and coordinating swift and efficient interactions between the emergency room and interventional cardiology doctors and staff. The most important outcome of this study, although not specifically measured, is that these systematic improvements resulted in the lives of many thousands of Americans being saved, including a substantial number who will be able to return to productive activity.”

There really is no nationwide standard for measuring emergency response times. However, the 50 biggest U.S. cities found that most facilities report only the slice of the response that looks most favorable: the time it takes for the emergency crew to drive to the scene for example. On many emergency runs, that is just a fraction of the time that passes between the call for help and the arrival of rescuers.

Yet most cities base quality-control decisions on these official response times, which are misleading and incomplete. As a result, people die, and attempts to improve survival rates fail.

More than 1,000 “saveable” lives are lost needlessly each year in the nation’s biggest cities because of inefficiencies in the cities’ emergency medical systems, and at the root of these inefficiencies in many cases is the simple matter of counting seconds.

Cities that rely on these imprecise response times leave precious minutes unaccounted for, such as minutes that are lost as the call for help is routed through a busy dispatch center or as crews park and make their way to the victim’s side, perhaps through a tall building, a shopping mall or an airport terminal.

Although response rates are much improved there is always room to better when it comes to life saving processes.

Written by Sy Kraft