Heart doctors have improved treatments to people who suffer a heart attack outside the hospital, but less attention has gone to patients already in the hospital for an unrelated medical problem who then have an attack.
In fact, recent studies suggest those patients are at least three times as likely to die before getting discharged as those who arrive at the emergency room after having a heart attack elsewhere, the
Wall Street Journal reports.
Now, 12 hospitals are joining forces to develop strategies — involving nurses in non-cardiac units to rapid-response teams in catheterization labs — to hasten care for in-hospital heart attack sufferers.
About 10,000 Americans a year have an attack in the hospital while being treated for such illnesses as cancer or pneumonia or undergoing a surgical procedure. That represents about 5 percent of the more than 200,000 people in the U.S. who suffer a major heart attack each year.
“With teams put together in a system, you can have better outcomes,” said Sidney Smith, a cardiologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is spearheading the project. “We can save some lives.”
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