Arkansas’s Ouachita County Medical Center Cuts Door-In, Door-Out Times for STEMI Patients by 50% with Pulsara

How one Arkansas hospital is using healthcare communication technology to dramatically speed up time-to-treatment for STEMI patients

BOZEMAN, Mont., April 4, 2022 — Pulsara, the leading mobile telehealth, communication, and logistics platform that unites healthcare teams and technologies across organizations during dynamic events, published new details on Arkansas-based Ouachita County Medical Center’s record improvements in patient care. The Ouachita County Medical Center Case Study reveals the challenges many hospitals face when trying to transfer patients quickly, and the solution they found that enabled faster transfers and streamlined communication across organizations, ensuring secure and efficient patient care.

As a small medical center in rural southern Arkansas, Ouachita County Medical Center (OCMC) faced a lengthy and inefficient process when transferring STEMI patients to percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) facilities that could provide critical care. Jennifer Ray, RN, OCMC’s ER and ICU manager, explained that in 2017, the average door-in, door-out (DIDO) time was 72 minutes for the 19 STEMI patients who came into the OCMC ER—more than double what the American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association recommends.

“The timeliness of the patient getting in and out was very, very slow,” Ray said. “We needed a way to get patients out of our facility quicker—and get them to those PCIs without all the phone calls.”

In an effort to solve this issue all across the state, the Arkansas Department of Health launched a pilot program in 2018, selecting Ouachita to participate in the implementation of Pulsara. With the help of Pulsara’s communication platform that unites care teams on a single patient channel, OCMC was able to facilitate these transfers in a more effective and timely manner with the single touch of a button.

“As soon as we identify a STEMI, we activate [Pulsara] and there are no phone calls we need to make to El Dorado,” Ray said. EMS is notified simultaneously, too, she added. “They come around and as soon as we have done everything we’re going to do [for the patient], we put them in the back of an ambulance.” 

In addition to the hospital care team's seamless transfers, their EMS care teams got on board. “If [EMS identifies] a STEMI in the field,” Ray explained, “they bypass our hospital and go straight to the PCI hospital.” Now, they too are able to help transfer patients, facilitating even faster treatment in order for them to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right resources to give patients the best care possible. 

After implementing the platform in early 2018, OCMC’s average DIDO time for STEMI patients quickly dropped from 72 to 41 minutes—a 43 percent decrease. Halfway through 2021, that number continued to decrease to 36 minutes, despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within just a few years on the platform, OCMC cut their DIDO by 50 percent. That’s nearly 4 times less than the average 140 minute DIDO time when transferring to another of their frequent referral hospitals. 

Because of the incredible results they have seen with Pulsara, the OCMC team plans to broaden their use of the platform to cover patients with other time-sensitive diseases, including trauma and sepsis.

“Everyone is looking for any possible way to make life easier,” Ray said. “And so we’re always looking for ways to streamline any process to make things more efficient for physicians and, these days, especially for nurses, to provide safe, quality care to our patients.”

For more details, download the case study here.

About Ouachita County Medical Center

Ouachita County Medical Center (OCMC) is a not-for-profit hospital with 99 beds, serving residents of the rural community surrounding the city of Camden in southern Arkansas, about 100 miles from Little Rock. As a smaller, non-PCI facility, OCMC often coordinates transfers for their STEMI patients to PCI facilities. 

About Pulsara

It’s about people. During the most critical moments in life, Pulsara unites distributed teams and fragmented technologies as dynamic events evolve on a scalable communications and logistics platform, improving the lives of people in need and those who serve them.

We envision a world where needless suffering is eliminated because communities can unite and communicate without friction. Pulsara customers report average reductions in treatment times of between 22% and 68%. For more information, visit www.pulsara.com.

###

Press Contact:
Hannah Ostrem
Senior Director of Marketing, Pulsara
Hannah.Ostrem@pulsara.com 
(877) 903-5642