STOP STEMI©-a novel medical application to improve the coordination of STEMI care: a brief report on door-to-balloon times after initiating the application.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to evaluate the effect of the STOP STEMI© medical application on door-to-balloon (D2B) time in patients arriving to our emergency department with an acute ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction (STEMI). STOP STEMI© is a novel medical application developed by physicians to improve the coordination and communication tasks essential to rapid assessment and care of the patients suffering from a STEMI.

METHODS: We conducted a retrospective before and after review of the Good Shepherd Health System STEMI quality assurance/improvement dashboard for a 10-month period between November, 2012 and September, 2013 (4 months before STOP STEMI© and 6 months after). Data was collected using a standard data collection form and entered on the dashboard by a STEMI coordinator blinded to study objectives. We calculated the average D2B times before and after initiation of STOP STEMI© along with the improvement in the benchmarks of D2B less than 90 min and D2B less than 60 minutes. A subgroup analysis of Center for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) reportable cases was conducted to evaluate these benchmarks in the subset of patients meeting the criteria for CMS reporting by our facility.

RESULTS: During the study period, we received 155 STEMI patients, average 0.5 patients per day. One hundred twelve of the patients underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), 37 preSTOP STEMI©, and 75 postSTOP STEMI©. Of the 112 PCI cases, 7 were excluded leaving 105 cases for analysis, 36 preapplication and 69 postapplication. We found a 22% reduction in the average door-to-balloon time after implementing the STOP STEMI© application (91-71 minutes) respectively, the average difference of 20 minutes P = 0.05 (95% CI, -1-40minutes). In the analysis of CMS reportable cases (n = 64 cases), we observed a decrease in the average D2B of 15 minutes (68-53 minutes), a 22% reduction P = 0.03 (95% CI 1-29min). In the CMS reportable cases, we saw an improvement in the D2B time less than 90 minutes from 78-95% and less than 60 minutes D2B improvement from 56-80%. We also observed an appropriate absolute reduction in PCI resource utilization by 11%.

CONCLUSIONS: In this cohort of patients, the utilization of STOP STEMI© decreased the average door-to-balloon times by 22% in the patients with acute STEMI arriving at our emergency department. This effect was maintained when looking at the subset of all STEMI cases reportable to CMS. We also observed modest improvements in meeting the less than 60-minute, less than 90-minute benchmarks, and improvements in the resource utilization.