A few comments (which aren't necessarily a complaint about your product) from a firefighter/paramedic:<p>1. Nursing home staff should be able to recognize typical and atypical signs of cardiac arrest ('should' being a key part of this).<p>2. My county's 911 service (serving 300,000 people) has the following response times: 6.0min for BLS (Basic Life Support) services, 6.1min for ALS (Advanced Life Support). 15 minute response times would be... a whole new world.<p>3. Impending cardiac arrest, I'd be curious as to what the 'difference made' would be. Administering ASA (aspirin)? Not emergently significant. Nitro? Typically self-administered, and again, I'd question the quality of a nursing facility that didn't feel comfortable administering such drugs based on vitals and symptoms alone, without needing the assistance of an ED physician (granted, several in our area as a policy/liability concern will immediately phone 911 as their 'treatment plan' for these situations - but similarly, these same facilities would be on the low end of the bell curve for utilizing a service like Call9).<p>4. Similarly, a nursing facility that wasn't vigorous in training and utilization of CPR/AED (because that's the number one hope for an arrest patient, high quality chest compressions - in the absence of tele-EKG for administering cardiac drugs for certain arrhythmias and dysrhythmia - again, if your 911 arrival time is 15+ minutes, perhaps...)<p>I can definitely see a use case for anything that moves from "proactive" (nor necessarily in a positive, often actually a negative sense) ED / 911 visit called by a skilled nursing facility. Indeed any increase in the use of a community outreach / service for high risk patients is a good thing.<p>I did read that you are indeed going to supply EKG and US to clients, and this helps - but I'd be curious about the value of some interventions. A presentation of impending cardiac arrest should be a first call to 911 (I realize your example presented with constipation and stomach pain). And in the context of having to talk a nurse through an EKG, what interventions do you really expect them to be able to reliably perform (start an IO/IV)? I am intrigued though, to see how this could grow, but it seems to me that your target might want to be 'urgent care' as much as emergency medicine.<p>Of course, where 911 response truly is that slow (and I know that it can be in several parts of the country), then anything that helps the patient's prognosis cannot be a bad thing.
Very cool! I think this could help with sudden cardiac arrest, where the heart stops pumping blood effectively and death happens within minutes--faster than an ambulance can arrive.
<a href="http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/heart/disorders/arrhythmia/sudden-cardiac-death" rel="nofollow">http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/heart/disorders/arrhy...</a><p>The survival rate of sudden cardiac arrest is 8%, and it kills about 350,000-400,000 people in just the US. It's our #1 killer.<p>The difference between a life saved and a life lost is whether non-medical bystanders can intervene and perform CPR or use an AED within the first couple of minutes.
This looks fascinating.<p>i) do you have plans to gather data? Correct research would be tricky, but have you considered collaborations with researchers / statisticians? It'd be fascinating to see some robust numbers after a year<p>ii) in England a considerable amount of 999 calls are either alcohol or mental health related. You've limited the "custer base" to schools and care homes and etc, but how will you handle such calls? For example: you get a call for someone who has engaged in severe (requiring surgery and hospital admission) self harm but who has no suicidal intent. Do you have procedures for that kind of call?<p>Thanks for patiently answering questions! HN is sometimes somewhat hostile. :-/
“In a few years, people are going to be using Call9 instead of calling 911,” says Tenev.<p>I doubt it. I would never put my life in the hands of an insurance like app which may or may not work; say where data is not available. You can call 911 over all cell network even if yours is not available/no sim/unregistered phone.<p>I hope Call9 understands the emergency side of the business esp around PSAP? Otherwise it won't scale and will be liable should their technology fail to save a life.<p>A problem with mobile phones is location. Unlike a home phone which is tied to your physical home address, how will the emergency personnel know where you are if you pass out before telling them the address? Cell tower location find can be up to 100m away from you. Satellite requires 3+ direct satellite triangulation.<p>Then there is the routing issue. So the app connects to a Physician in a hospital? But hospitals don't own Ambulances. Ambulance companies are private in the USA. So a hospital will in turn contact the Ambulance company. Additional piping that can be avoided with a better model. Say; if Call9 connected directly with an Ambulance company that is running a Home Visit Program (HVP) ie. Paramedicine, then use the EMT to triage the situation using industry Protocols/ICD. Then, Call9 would be starting to solve Hospital Readmission Penalties/Rates. That's a big fish worth $$$ per patient and thus a great disruptive business model.<p>Now of course this is all easier said than done since the red tape to get this going is the major hurdle. The technology part is easy. I've been down this rabbit hole ;-)
It looks like this product introduces an extra delay before an ambulance is called - terrible idea. When you have a heart attack, you want an ambulance, not an Uber driver (UberFIRST-AID) or a Skype call with a doctor (this startup).
Hi Tim, congrats on the launch from back here in Boston! I had a couple of questions on what I'll call 'sensitivity' and 'specificity' in your early work:<p>Sensitivity: What's the OR, relative delta, or NNT in calls for changing prehospital acuity or intervention to a higher than initially suspected level?<p>Specificity: How often does the early contact result in a less intense, on-site, or diverted response?<p>So many questions! Would love to hear what you're finding.<p>(edit: copy)
"The team has a group of 130 doctors standing by"<p>I think that this is not a startup, but a psychology experiment that needs to find out just how gullible we are.
This is really interesting. I know it's not a replacement for it, but 911 seems so inefficient and outdated to me today. I'm excited to see how this company progresses. Small improvements here can really save lives.
Why not dispatch the ambulance as soon as the call is received, and call it back a few seconds later if the doctor determines it's not an emergency?
DO NOT visit call9.com<p>If you were curious, like me, why Call9 didn't use call9.com, don't visit that domain to find out. It will redirect you to a malware website.<p>IMHO, Call9 should attempt to acquire the call9.com domain (or sue for it), since it clearly serves no decent purpose.
This is dangerous for one reason and one reason alone: It conflates the message of "Medical emegency, call 911". We've had that drilled into our heads and drill it into our children's heads.<p>Now, you want people to question that in a time of emergency? "Crap! Mom is having a heart attack! Should I call 911 or use Call9? It's supposed to be better! Shit, where is my smartphone, all I have is this landline. Crap, my smartphone is upstairs, I'll just use my tablet. Wait, I don't have Skype installed on my tablet. Dammit, I'll just call 911".