You are dispatched to a report of a disoriented man on the beach. On arrival bystanders direct you to a 49 year old male who is sitting on a bench. An elderly couple states they were taking a walk and saw the man sitting on the bench and became worried about him due to his […]

In this excellent article from the March 2007 Journal of the Emergency Medical Services, Tim Phalen discusses the importance of performing serial 12 lead ECGs. Here are some of the highlights. “Acute myocardial infarctions (AMIs) aren’t like broken bones and, therefore, ECGs aren’t static like X-rays. If an EMS crew were treating a hip fracture […]

Here’s an interesting 12 lead ECG that I found on the Lifenet Receiving Station at my receiving hospital. It immediately caught my eye for a couple of different reasons. In the first place, it’s an incomplete 12 lead ECG. Lead V1 is missing. This is probably the reason the GE/Marquette 12SL interpretive algorithm is giving […]

That’s that tag line of a tremendous article that appeared in the March 2007 issue of Emergency Medical Services entitled Out-of-Hospital STEMI Alert by David Jaslow, MD, MPH, EMT-P, FAAEM. I think the tag line sums up the frustration many of us “STEMI activists” feel when our prehospital 12 lead ECG programs flounder. Here are […]

This is the latest in a series of posts I am dedicating to achieving excellent data quality for prehospital 12 lead ECGs, particularly when they are being transmitted to the emergency department for physician interpretation (and early activation of the cardiac cath lab). Lately I have noticed that when an ECG shows artifact in the […]

This video was shown during a LUCAS device demonstration at our receiving hospital in 2008. It’s a time lapse of a heart in VF (swine model). The handout from Physio-Control had a diagram explaining that forward blood flow continues for several minutes after the onset of VF while arterial pressure (AP) and central venous pressure […]

For all you visual learners out there. This one is a classic!