A smartphone app unveiled on Tuesday could help doctors more easily identify patients who are at risk of dying of a heart attack.
The app will help doctors, nurses or paramedics quickly calculate the severity of a patient’s condition and help them offer the most appropriate immediate and long-term treatments.
The speed and versatility of the device, which was developed by the universities of Edinburgh and Massachusetts, will help doctors decide if a patient needs to be transferred to a specialist cardiac centre.
It will enable clinicians to spot whether patients are at risk of a repeat attack, both shortly after the first attack and also over the next three years.
This will assist clinicians to draw up longer-term treatment plans compared with a previous system that assessed risk over a six-month-period.
Doctors can download the app on to their smartphones from app stores for free as a cheap and easy way to identify if heart attack patients are at risk of another attack.
They can then open the app and input patients’ data following an attack.
