Just yesterday we reported on the growing competition between wireless remote monitoring companies CardioNet and LifeWatch, which both help physicians monitor patients at risk for heart arrythmias via wireless devices and sensors. How can wireless health services help people who actually have heart failure, though? The University Hospital in New Jersey with help from Verizon Wireless and Medtronic created a program to determine how wireless technologies and improved operational processes could reduce the time it took to get a heart failure patient into a physician's care and make better use of the time that first responders had with the patient while in transit to the hospital.

The program demonstrates how smartphones, Bluetooth-enabled monitors and pagers could all work together to create a system that reduces the time and increases the efficiencies involved in getting a heart failure patient the care they need. Here are some of the technical and operational issues the program dealt with -- be sure to read the entire article over at EMS Responder for more.

The program identified a few potential roadblocks from the outset:

> Bad or missing wires to connect cell phones to monitors to transmit EKGs.
> Regulatory compliance issues, especially if the ED was going to be bypassed.
> Administrative issues included how to properly register patients and acquire appropriate consent in an expeditious manner. 
> Technology issues included how to efficiently transmit the EKG, and once it was sent, how to ensure it got to the cardiologists.
> Communications issues included how to best notify paramedics about the patient's destination (cath lab vs. ED).

The program planned to upgrade the hospital's Medtronic LIFEPAK monitors so they could accept Bluetooth EKG transmission from specific mobile phones, and an EKG receiving station was set-up in the cath lab. Smartphones were also distributed to all cardiology fellows, several attending physicians and the chief of cardiology. The phones had a PDF reader installed so when the physician received an email with an EKG in a PDF attachment from the EKG receiving station, they could open it. After sending the EKGs the station would page the appropriate pagers.