Acute Chest Pain Management

Patients who come to the Pauley Heart Center because they are experiencing chest pain receive the most advanced chest pain evaluation and treatment procedures available in the region. Our Acute Chest Pain Management unit is nationally recognized for its chest pain diagnosis system that quickly and reliably identifies emergency patients suspected of having acute cardiac disease. The innovative solution—“Heart Track”—is a triage system that assists healthcare professionals in rapidly classifying chest pain patients and setting them on an appropriate course for treatment. Top cardiologists and emergency medicine physicians regard it as the model of choice for evaluating chest pain, and the system is now being emulated by many hospital emergency departments across the country.

The Heart Track system at the Pauley Heart Center has substantially reduced the number of patients admitted, while making treatment faster and more effective for those who need it. Frequently, patients who are identified as having myocardial infarction (heart attack) by a heart scan—despite a negative electrocardiogram—are triaged directly to the cath lab for intervention, thereby reducing the size of the heart attack.

We continue to build and refine our system to employ the fastest, most reliable evaluation and intervention technologies. For instance, for certain cardiac arrest patients we are inducing a period of mild hypothermia to improve both survival and favorable neurological outcomes. In addition, we are actively involved in a clinical trial that is comparing a new device for cooling, called “Arctic Sun,” against conventional cooling techniques. We also are investigating CT scans and MRIs of the heart and coronary arteries, as well as other perfusion agents that have the potential for “ischemic memory” (the ability to identify areas of decreased blood flow in the heart) that have occurred prior to the patient presenting with heart attack symptoms.