New ECMO Intake Center designed to save lives across Minnesota
When someone’s heart suddenly stops beating, they might collapse, stop breathing, lose consciousness, and have no pulse. This is a medical emergency called sudden cardiac arrest. The course of action is to call 911 and do chest compressions.
When a person goes into cardiac arrest, every minute counts toward keeping them alive. To provide life-saving care quickly, M Health Fairview has opened a new extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) Intake Center at M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis. Patients experiencing sudden cardiac arrest have received life-saving care at the ECMO Center of Excellence at M Health Fairview for years, but this new intake center will help speed delivery of life-saving care.
Quick ECMO care saves lives.
ECMO is a life support machine that does the job of the heart and/or lungs. It allows a person’s body to rest and heal from conditions like pneumonia, sepsis, or cardiac arrest. Survival rates for sudden cardiac arrest have historically been very low, but putting a person in cardiac arrest on an ECMO machine vastly increases their odds of survival.
The cardiac critical care team at M Health Fairview is dedicated to reducing the amount of time it takes to get people on the machine – a process called cannulating. The latest life-saving innovation is a dedicated space in the emergency department at M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center where the equipment is always ready. The ECMO Intake Center is a pivotal addition to our ECMO Center of Excellence, aimed at advancing emergency heart care and improving cardiac arrest survival rates across Minnesota. A grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust supported the launch of the ECMO Center of Excellence.
“The time it takes from a 911 call to the person being placed on ECMO is the single most important predictor of outcomes,” said Demetris Yannopoulos, MD, a structural heart disease and interventional cardiologist with M Health Fairview. Yannopoulos is also a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “If I were to put somebody on ECMO within 15 minutes to 30 minutes, the majority of these people will survive. We have done enough now to know that this is north of 80% survival rate for the disease. If you don't have that, you probably have a 30% to 40% survival chance when pulses are achieved with standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) within the same time.”
This was demonstrated in a 2019-2020 study that Yannopoulos led along with Jason Bartos, MD, a cardiac critical care and interventional cardiologist at M Health Fairview. Bartos is also an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School. The study compared survival rates from sudden cardiac arrest patients who received ECMO care to those who got the standard care of advanced cardiac life support. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute had to stop the study early because the ECMO patients had much better outcomes. It was deemed unethical not to put all patients on ECMO if the option was available.
The results of the study fueled desire to reduce the time to putting someone on ECMO and give people in the Twin Cities metro area the greatest chance of surviving cardiac arrest. Working across health systems and in partnership with the University of Minnesota as part of the Minnesota Mobile Resuscitation Consortium, the team set up ECMO cannulation sites at M Health Fairview Southdale Hospital and Regions Hospital in St. Paul.
Then the team created a mobile ECMO program with funding from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. By bringing an ECMO system on the road to patients, the medical team could shave several minutes off the response time, potentially saving more lives.
“If we could meet them there, we could trim 10 to 15 minutes off the time to cannulate them instead of having to travel all the way to a hospital,” Bartos said.
