Handheld Medical Device Works With Blood Testing Assays to Detect Heart Attacks And More In Minutes
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A modern marvel in emerging
healthcare technology, the Minicare I-20 is a handheld medical device developed
by Philips that can quickly, and early on, determine whether a patient is
having a heart attack. Largely used during emergency situations, it provides
results in as little as 10 minutes, whereas standard hospital lab testing often
takes significantly longer.
"Blood samples are usually
analyzed in the hospital laboratory, which can easily take more than an hour to
get the result back to the ED physician," says Dr. Paul Collinson,
consultant chemical pathologist at St. George's University Hospitals NHS
Foundation Trust in the U.K. "Point-of-care testing can significantly help
to reduce the turnaround time."
The Minicare I-20 uses assays
that employ Philips' Magnotech biosensor technology to detect heart attacks in
moments. The medical device and biological product technology measures the
patient's level of Cardiac Troponin (cTnI), a protein which the heart releases
during a heart attack. By identifying the amount of this protein in patients,
physicians are able to determine if the patient is or was experiencing a heart
attack, and if the patient needs urgent care.
The Minicare I-20 system consists
of a handheld analyzer, dedicated software, and a single-use disposable
cartridge containing an application specific assay that works with as little as
a finger prick of blood, and do not require quality control which makes the
medical device and biologic system ideal for use in hospitals where funds and
resources are tightly controlled.
Better still for patients,
medical practitioners, and those who manage provider budgets, the Minicare I-20
has multiple blood testing capabilities and can use any of a variety of
promising assay cartridges that are being developed to detect certain hormones,
drugs, and proteins, providing more opportunities for point-of-care testing.
Accurate and timely point-of care
testing for heart attacks could be the difference between life and death for
hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S., alone. According to the American
Heart Association, 2014 saw about 356,500 people who experienced
out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the U.S., and about 209,000 who experienced
in-patient cardiac arrest. Worse still are the survival rates, which sat at a
measly 12 percent for cardiac arrest patients treated by emergency medical
services, and 38.6 percent of bystander-witnessed out-of-hospital cardiac
arrests in 2014.
Medical devices are
becoming smaller, more portable and faster. And this technology takes another
step in the right direction by tackling one of the biggest problems in
healthcare; time, or lack thereof. The Minicare I-20 system is the latest
point-of-care innovation from Philips and it has foregone extensive testing in
real-life settings with the European Lab2Go project and has shown that the
system can measure cTnI values of blood components quickly, accurately, and
efficiently.
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