A team of doctors at the University of Virginia medical center has developed an app to more easily, quickly, and efficiently transmit electrocardiogram tracings from heart attack patients to doctors, enabling doctors to diagnose a particular kind of heart attack that can benefit from immediate treatment.

UVA Medical Center

A STEMI, or ST segment myocardial infarction, is a kind of heart attack, diagnosable from an EKG, in which the coronary artery is completely blocked off by a blood clot. It's considered by many to be the most dangerous kind of heart attack, and one where the time saved by having doctors prepare for surgery ahead of time can be crucial.

The app, called STEMISend is meant to be used when someone is responding to a heart attack with a portable EKG machine. Normally, getting the data from the EKG machine to a physician can be a complicated proposition, Dr. David Burt told MobiHealthNews. Most of the existing commercial systems, where the EKG hooks up to a modem to send readings to a hospital computer, are expensive and time consuming. On the other hand, just snapping a photo with a mobile phone's camera is not always high enough quality to be helpful, and can also take a long time.

STEMISend uses the phone camera but compresses the file size as much as possible while still maintaining a diagnostic-quality image.

"Our question was, could we design an app that would take a photo that's diagnostic grade, cut it down in file size, and then test it and see how it works," Burt said. "After we started to test all this we found out that actually this app works quite well. It transmits the photo clearly 94 percent of the time in 10 seconds or less."

Burt and his team have been doing preliminary field testing on the app, taking pictures at various locations near UVA's campus where heart attacks often occur, like local grocery stores. They tested the app more than 1,500 times via Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless networks, with three or more bars of cellular service.

"In the future, we're going to start testing it with zero, one, or two bars," he said. "Shortly after this we're going to test it head-to-head against commercial systems."

The system can remain HIPAA compliant even though the pictures are sent through unsecure cellular networks in the same way that radio conversations with emergency response workers comply with HIPAA: by eliminating patient identifiers. The EKG images are sent without images or names of the patients.

Burt says the goal is to make this remain a low-cost option for hospitals that can't afford to invest in expensive commercial systems:

"Our hope is that we can prove that it works, that it's reliable, we can show how its performance stacks up against commercial systems, and then make it cheap as possible ... so anybody who has a need for it can use it."