Seattle firefighters say a new tool could dramatically increase your chance of surviving a cardiac arrest in the city. The smartphone alert system that went live in Seattle on Wednesday will notify volunteers willing to perform CPR that someone has collapsed nearby, reports the Seattle Times. PulsePoint, already used by 750,000 people in 26 states and Canada, is being introduced in Seattle thanks to the Medic One Foundation and Seattle Fire Department. They hope to get 15,000 citizen responders to download the app over the next several months, in a bid to increase Seattle’s already high rate of bystander CPR.
“PulsePoint may get CPR started when no CPR was started at all,” Michael Sayre, medical director for Medic One and a University of Washington professor of emergency medicine, told the Times. “I know the folks in Seattle are people who will be willing to jump in and help their neighbors.”
Already, Seattle bystanders do jump in more than half the time, about 55 percent. As a result, survival rates for bystander-witnessed cardiac arrests in King County are high: 62 percent in 2013, compared to 30 percent nationally. Nine out of 10 cardiac arrest victims die, but when bystanders start CPR during the first three to five minutes after a person collapses, their survival odds double or even triple, according to experts.
PulsePoint uses 911 calls to trigger the cell phone alerts. Founder Richard Price, a former San Ramon, California, fire chief, says getting dispatch centers to install the system can take a long time. He’s been talking to Medic One and Seattle Fire Department for more than two years.
“It’s just a complex environment to work in,” Price told the Times. “And it’s also an environment that wants you to prove your worth. They aren’t experimenters.”
The Employees Community Fund of Boeing provided $137,000 for the launch in King and Snohomish counties. Already, 1,000 firefighters in the Seattle department have downloaded the app in a soft launch. About 60 percent of PulsePoint users are professionals, and the other 40 percent are typically CPR-trained citizens. Since the company’s 2009 founding, there have been nearly 10,000 activations involving more than 24,000 citizen responders, according to a spokesperson.
Jen Kinney is a freelance writer and documentary photographer. Her work has also appeared in Philadelphia Magazine, High Country News online, and the Anchorage Press. She is currently a student of radio production at the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies. See her work at jakinney.com.
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