A study from the Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center showed that using a text-messaging-based alert system led to quicker in-hospital responses to cardiac arrests.
In most hospitals, a code team handles cardiac arrest. Activating the code team begins with a call to the hospital operator and then the operator pages the code team, according to an Oct. 31 American Heart Association news release.
During the study, researchers electronically mapped the code blue buttons behind patient beds to a system that securely sent text messages alerting code team members and called the hospital operator. The modified buttons also sent data from patients' electronic medical records to the code team. In the study of 35 cardiac arrests using the button text system, the text messaging reduced code team notification time by over a minute.
"Improving the notification processes can get code teams to the patient faster, equipped with knowledge about the patient that may lead to targeted treatments that more efficiently revive the patient," Cody Couperus, MD, the leader of the study, said in the AHA news release. "Time is of the essence, and the sooner a patient is treated for an underlying cause, the more likely they are to survive without serious brain injury. In the future, we hope to show that code teams arrive faster using this smartphone code blue notification system and that more patients survive without severe brain injury."