According to the Austin, Texas–based company, about half the time a patient enters the ER they don’t know, can’t communicate or aren’t carrying the wallet card listing the specific brand of their pacemaker or implanted defibrillator. This causes delays in triage and treatment — with different approaches being needed for each manufacturer — and clinicians often have to resort to an X-ray to determine the type of device.
BridgeSource’s SmartRead system can be used by frontline healthcare workers to identify an implant within 20 seconds. It works by mimicking the initial communication pings sent by the programming wands from each major implant manufacturer and waiting for a response, including devices from Abbott, Biotronik, Boston Scientific, Medtronic and MicroPort.