What will solve the Heart Attack Problem in the United States is a certain amount of OUTRAGE as to why so many Americans die of this illness when we know that 50% of them start out with beginning chest symptoms that can be recognized and acted upon by getting the person quickly into the Hospital www.DeputyHeartAttack.org

1. Heart Attacks have Beginnings……and how best to get to these Beginnings is our Challenge
EHAC Progress Report Ray Bahr MD Shahriar Dadkhah
MD
(1)- EHAC or Community Outreach was initially Key Element 8 in the Chest Pain Center Strategy to
provide Early Heart Attack Care. Because of its importance, it was moved to Key Element No.1 to place
more Emphasis on the Awareness of early chest symptoms that was needed both in the Community as
well as with Employees within the Hospital.
(2)- www.DeputyHeartAttack.org is an Internet based standardized program that teaches about
early heart attack symptoms, followed by a test that when passed allows the individual to become
deputized and take an Oath to act when confronted with a person having early symptoms.
(3)- The Accreditation Team has been working very closely with New Hospitals to promote the
EHAC program and I follow up with a telephone call to the Contact Nurse to provide additional
suggestions The reason that we added Hospital Employees to the Community Outreach was to help staff
understand the purpose of their Chest Pain Center and to become ambassadors for it in their offtime.
(4)- To measure our performance, we worked with the IT department and added an EHAC
Counter on the web site to track the number being deputized. We started this about 9 months ago and
at the Congress,we had about 20,000 deputized. We had projected about 100,000 by the end of 2013…..
as of Sept.25, we have 120,000 EHAC Deputies.
(5)- EHAC education is now required for All Hospital Employees in Cycle IV. This is now made
easy in that the EHAC Teaching Module can be added to the HealthStream Competency Training that
has courses for each hospital requirements. With a 400 bed hospital, there are about 3000 Employees.
Each hospital is required to do EHAC education in the community …..another 2000 EHAC Deputies…..for
a total of about 5000 EHAC Deputies for each New Accredited Hospital.
(6)- Cycle V will be introduced at the next Congress in April,2014 and we expect to have over 1000
Accredited Chest Pain Centers within a year after that.
Doing the Math for an additional 200 New Chest Pain Centers,
200 CPCs times 5000 EHAC Deputies/ Hospital equals at least One Million EHAC Deputies
(7)- Observation Services Discussion Working with the American Heart
Association,CMS,hhs,CDC
(8)- Power of an Idea whose Time has come……in further getting out the EHAC Message.
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