Cardiac Alert: Decreasing Door-to-Balloon Time for ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction

The American College of Cardiology has now begun a nationwide campaign, "Guidelines Applied in Practice (GAP) D2B: An Alliance for Quality" to enlist hospital administrators and urge them to address the discrepancies of door-to-balloon (D2B) time for patients presenting with ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Here, Kordish et al contend that the issue at hand is not the lack of desire to decrease D2B times but the lack of a clear process that effectively enables health care workers to effect a change for patients with STEMI. According to them, creating a certain timeline will enable physicians and staff of both the emergency department and cardiac catheterization laboratory to better understand actual areas of delay in the process.