The Kasturba Medical College (KMC) and Philips Healthcare announced the launch of the State’s first set of chest pain clinics here.
Addressing presspersons here on Wednesday, Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, said the clinics will enable small hospitals and nursing homes in and around Manipal to provide timely and quality emergency cardiac care to citizens, and save more lives.
While cardiovascular diseases have quadrupled in the last 40 years, it’s a known fact that 50 per cent of the affected patients arrived too late for appropriate treatment. If the patient received treatment within one hour of the attack — called ‘the golden hour’ — the possibilities of saving his/her life would increase manifold.
The chest pain clinics will be operated under the ‘hub and spoke’ model and will include five ‘spoke’ hospitals (chest pain clinics) and one ‘hub’ hospital (KMC). Each clinic will be a small healthcare facility equipped with Philips Efficia ECG-100 systems to wirelessly transmit ECG reports of patients in real time from the ‘spokes’ (chest pain clinics) to the ‘hub’ (KMC).
Once a patient is confirmed as suffering from a Myocardial Infarction, known as a heart attack, he/she would be immediately transported via ambulance from the clinic to the KMC, for primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) within the golden hour.
The clinics, led by doctors, are located in five places in and around Manipal. They are Avinash/Ranjitha at Malpe Urban Health Centre; Kirthinath Ballal at Dr. T.M.A. Pai Rotary Hospital, Karkala; Vijaya Lakshmi at Hirebettu Primary Health Centre; Narasimha Nayak at Hebri Community Health Centre; and Manmohan Shetty, an Ayurvedic general practitioner at Kukkikatte.
Philips Healthcare will support the KMC with training the staff, recording and storing all ECG related data, developing protocols and periodic review of data. “Together with KMC, we are proud to launch the State’s first set of chest pain clinics,” Mr. Prasad said.
Ranjan Shetty, Head of the Department of Cardiology, KMC, said cardiac mortality was high in suburbs and rural areas because of unavailability of required infrastructure making saving lives difficult. For a cardiac patient to be treated in time, diagnosis and treatment should begin in 7 to 8 minutes. However, in most cases, time was wasted due to lack of adequate infrastructure. Another problem was that without access to ECG reports, it took time for the doctor to aptly diagnose the reason for sickness. “These chest pain clinics will help doctors save diagnosis time by accurately identifying high-risk patients. Once an issue is identified, the hospital can prepare to receive the patient and treatment can begin without any delay,” he said.
