After years of work by public and private stakeholders, Lancaster County has launched a new initiative to prevent deaths from heart attacks.
The county has activated PulsePoint, a mobile app that notifies nearby individuals when a cardiac emergency occurs in their vicinity.
A year ago, the county commissioners approved a contract with PulsePoint, a California-based nonprofit. On Wednesday, they spoke more about the adoption of the technology, recognizing the local healthcare leaders and emergency responders who made it happen.
The county’s implementation of PulsePoint is being fully funded by Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health at a cost of $100,000 for five years.
Darrell Fisher, president of the Lancaster County EMS Council and EMS Chief of the New Holland Ambulance Association, presented information on the program, acknowledging input from members of the LG Health, Penn State and WellSpan health systems.
“We stood here about a year ago and spoke to you about the healthcare crisis,” Fisher said, noting that 1,000 people die in America from heart attacks every day.
The survival rate, he said, is under 15% nationally, but that can be doubled by using software like PulsePoint to provide quicker intervention.
Statistics show that 60% of cardiac arrest victims don’t receive CPR until emergency responders arrive by ambulance, which is often after the critical first 5 minutes. PulsePoint maintains that not only can early intervention raise survival rates from 10% to 30%, but that they can reach 50% if early intervention is combined with access to automatic external defibrillators.
Fisher said Lancaster County is the 13th county statewide to adopt PulsePoint, joining an estimated 4,000 communities nationwide.
The app network, he said, will be hardwired to the county’s 911 center. Fisher said individuals can easily find the PulsePoint “Respond” app in the Apple app store or Google’s Play Store, as well as its Automatic External Defibrillator mapping app (Apple | Android).
“Many lives will be saved,” Fisher said.
PulsePoint operates on a tiered system of participation. “Community responder” status is open to anyone who gets conventional CPR training. The alerts they receive are limited to incidents that occur in public places.
PulsePoint also identifies two higher-level participation tiers: Verified Responder and Verified Responder Pro. PulsePoint, according to company information, offers Verified Responder status to an individual “with medical or rescue training, including residential security staff or residents … with special neighborhood responsibilities.” These members will get alerts for heart attacks that happen in a residential setting.
For Verified Responder Pro, which PulsePoint calls “the professional version of PulsePoint Respond, participants are alerted to all calls in the jurisdiction. They also get address information and routing as well as “detailed incident information and additional notification options.”
The commissioners were enthusiastic about the potential for saving lives.
“As a public official, there is no higher duty than protecting the health, welfare and safety … of the citizens,” Commissioner Ray D’Agostino.
“What I love about this is that we’re harnessing technology and the collaboration of our community, so that we can help each other.”
“It was certainly a long time coming,” said Commissioner Josh Parsons, thanking the team. “There’s a lot of work that went into this.”
Parsons said some of the delay in implementing PulsePoint was related to regulatory and legal issues that needed to be resolved.
“I think it’s going to be a big deal for the community as word gets out about this,” he said. “You’ll see and hear stories of people being saved because of this.”
Commissioner John Trescot, who was an EMT in college, said he downloaded the app after hearing about its potential.
“It’s beneficial,” he said. “The first five minutes make all the difference.”
The commissioners issued a proclamation Wednesday designating February as American Heart Month.
