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Previous Volume 355:2308-2320 November 30, 2006 Number 22 Next

	Full Text PDF PDA Full Text PowerPoint Slide Set Supplementary Material Editorial by Moscucci, M. Letters Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited E-mail When Letters Appear PubMed Citation

ABSTRACT

Background Prompt reperfusion treatment is essential for patients who have myocardial infarction with ST-segment elevation. Guidelines recommend that the interval between arrival at the hospital and intracoronary balloon inflation (door-to-balloon time) during primary percutaneous coronary intervention should be 90 minutes or less. However, few hospitals meet this objective. We sought to identify hospital strategies that were significantly associated with a faster door-to-balloon time.

Methods We surveyed 365 hospitals to determine whether each of 28 specific strategies was in use. We used hierarchical generalized linear models and data on patients from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to determine the association between hospital strategies and the door-to-balloon time.

Results In multivariate analysis, six strategies were significantly associated with a faster door-to-balloon time. These strategies included having emergency medicine physicians activate the catheterization laboratory (mean reduction in door-to-balloon time, 8.2 minutes), having a single call to a central page operator activate the laboratory (13.8 minutes), having the emergency department activate the catheterization laboratory while the patient is en route to the hospital (15.4 minutes), expecting staff to arrive in the catheterization laboratory within 20 minutes after being paged (vs. >30 minutes) (19.3 minutes), having an attending cardiologist always on site (14.6 minutes), and having staff in the emergency department and the catheterization laboratory use real-time data feedback (8.6 minutes). Despite the effectiveness of these strategies, only a minority of hospitals surveyed were using them.

Conclusions Several specific hospital strategies are associated with a significant reduction in the door-to-balloon time in the management of myocardial infarction with ST-segment elevation.

Source Information

From the Departments of Epidemiology and Public Health (E.H.B., T.R.W., H.M.K.) and Medicine (J.H., Y.W., J.P.C., R.L.M., H.M.K.), Yale University School of Medicine; Yale–New Haven Hospital (B.A.B., J.A.M., S.A.R., J.P., H.M.K.); and Yale University School of Nursing (J.P.) — all in New Haven, CT; the University of Michigan Medical Center and the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Ann Arbor (B.K.N.); Kaiser Permanente and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver (D.J.M.); and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Oakbrook Terrace, IL (J.M.L.).

This article was published at www.nejm.org on November 13, 2006.

Full Text of this Article

Related Letters:

Door-to-Balloon Time in Acute Myocardial Infarction
Dalby M., Roughton M., Ilsley C., de LaCoussaye J. E., Carli P. A., Umans V. A., Peels H. O., Wharton T., Hall J., Roberts T., deBelder M., Townend J. N., Bradley E. H., Krumholz H. M., Moscucci M., Eagle K. A.
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N Engl J Med 2007; 356:1475-1479, Apr 5, 2007. Correspondence

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