PulsePoint Respond App
June 3, 2024
Skagit County Emergency Medical Services (EMS) has launched PulsePoint to support the County’s goal of creating a healthy and civically engaged community.
PulsePoint Respond, a free mobile app, gives you a real-time view into dispatch. It increases community awareness of emergency events and alerts people trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to cardiac arrest victims who are nearby.
The benefits of PulsePoint include:
- Alerting CPR-trained people to cardiac events in their area so they can give aid.
- Helping build a complete automated external defibrillator (AED) registry.
- Informing the community of EMS system activity in real time.
PulsePoint Respond empowers you to provide life‐saving help to victims of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). If you subscribe to the PulsePoint Respond app, say you are trained in CPR, and are willing to help in an emergency, you can get an alert if someone nearby is having an SCA and may need CPR.
If the cardiac emergency is in a public place, the location-aware app alerts nearby users of the need for CPR at the same time dispatch is alerted of the need for advanced medical care. The app also directs potential rescuers to the exact location of the closest AED.
The companion app, PulsePoint AED, lets you report and update AED locations. This helps emergency responders, including nearby community members, find an AED close to them when a cardiac emergency happens.
You can help build the community registry by using PulsePoint AED to describe the location of an AED and add a picture. Local authorities then verify this information. After verification, dispatchers and anyone using the PulsePoint Respond app can use the AED location data.
“With PulsePoint we hope to increase bystander involvement in these time-sensitive medical emergencies by increasing the use of CPR and AEDs,” said Josh Pelonio, Director of Skagit County Emergency Medical Services. “It gives our residents and visitors the ability to know when a cardiac arrest is occurring close by, locate AEDs in the area, and perform potentially lifesaving CPR while emergency personnel respond to the scene.”
In 2023, Skagit County EMS provider agencies responded to more than 18,000 incidents, including nearly 150 cardiac arrest events.
The latest American Heart Association guidelines, published in Circulation, state that these community programs could increase bystander CPR for the roughly 326,000 cardiac arrests that happen outside the hospital each year.
About the PulsePoint Foundation
PulsePoint is a public, 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation that builds apps for public safety agencies to increase community awareness during critical events.
The PulsePoint Respond mobile app notifies trained people of the nearby need for CPR. The PulsePoint AED registry identifies AED locations for use by the public and 9-1-1 telecommunicators during emergency call taking.
Learn more at pulsepoint.org. The apps are free to download from the App Store and Google Play.
About sudden cardiac arrest
Although a heart attack can lead to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), the two are not the same.
SCA happens when the heart malfunctions and suddenly stops beating without warning. A heart attack happens when blood flow to the heart is blocked, but the heart continues to beat.
Each year, more than 326,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests happen. This makes SCA a leading cause of death in the United States.
Survival rates across the country for SCA are less than eight percent. CPR can keep someone alive until paramedics arrive by maintaining vital blood flow to the heart and brain. However, only about a third of SCA victims receive CPR from a bystander.
Without CPR, brain damage or death can happen in minutes. The average EMS response time is nine minutes, even in cities. After 10 minutes there is little chance of successful resuscitation.
The American Heart Association estimates that effective bystander CPR, given right after SCA, can double or triple a person’s chance of survival.
