By LISA GREENE
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
TAMPA, Fla. — As he lay in the back of the ambulance, David Levine heard the paramedic say he was e-mailing it now.
Levine doesn’t remember much else. Just as the ambulance got to St. Joseph’s Hospital, his heart stopped.
But he knows this: He got a standing ovation this week when he walked into his office for the first time in the three weeks since his heart attack.
Doctors say that without new technology on board the Tampa Fire Rescue ambulance, Levine, 46, of Tampa, might have died or been left disabled.
Tampa Fire Rescue spent about $250,000 to equip 12 ambulances with EKG machines that use Bluetooth technology to send the heart test results ahead to the emergency room. Four Hillsborough hospitals - St. Joseph’s, Tampa General, University Community Hospital and Brandon Regional Hospital - can read the results.
The program is designed to get patients with a certain type of heart attack into a hospital cardiac catheterization lab faster, so that blockages can be found and opened with a procedure called a balloon angioplasty.
When such a blockage occurs, oxygen can’t flow to the heart muscles, and a wave of dying muscle cells begins to spread, said Dr. Xavier Prida, the interventional cardiologist who worked on Levine.
The faster the blockage is relieved, the less muscle is lost. Simply put, doctors like to say, time is muscle.
And the more muscle that dies, the greater the chances for death or disability.
National standards call for such patients to be treated with a balloon procedure within 90 minutes of arriving at the emergency room door. St. Joseph’s average now is about 82 minutes. Prida hopes the new technology can slice that time by as much as 20 minutes.
Levine made it in 43.
“The emphasis has been to move the care of the patient as close to the door of the emergency room as possible,” Prida said. “Now we’re extending it into the community.”
Nationally, only 10 percent of EMS services use EKGs in the ambulance, said Dr. Charles Sand, an emergency physician at St. Joseph’s.
The number who transmit those data to the emergency room is smaller. The American College of Emergency Physicians didn’t have an exact number Wednesday, but praised Tampa’s program as “innovative.”
Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg doesn’t use the technology, and calls to Pinellas County EMS officials were not returned Wednesday.
When Tampa Fire Rescue arrived at Levine’s banking office three weeks ago, Levine just wanted to go home. Paramedic Lt. Tim Hayes first used the EKG in the ambulance to convince Levine his problem was serious.
Hayes did two more on the way, e-mailing all three tests to St. Joseph’s.
“I could see his problem was getting worse,” he said.
When Levine’s heart stopped, medics used a defibrillator to restart it, and then took him immediately to the cardiac cath lab.
“I think it had a substantial impact on his life, and his quality of life,” said rescue chief Nick Locicero.
Levine, who is thinking of taking up running, agreed.
“I’m very lucky,” he said. “I’m so grateful to the EMTs. They basically saved my life.”