Excerpts from the news-gazette.com:

The PulsePoint Respond app was launched Monday in Champaign County by Presence Regional EMS and METCAD, the local emergency dispatch agency. It works by alerting users trained to administer CPR to the locations of nearby cardiac-arrest victims and where to find the nearest automated external defibrillators.

About 57 percent of U.S. adults have had CPR training, but only about only 11 percent have actually used it in a cardiac-arrest emergency, according to PulsePoint.

Fast treatment for cardiac arrest is so critical, the chance for survival drops 10 percent for every minute that passes without CPR.

Presence officials said it has taken about a year to launch PulsePoint in Champaign County, and they’re preparing to make it available in Vermilion County in upcoming months.

Not every PulsePoint app user in the county is alerted for every cardiac-arrest case. The system generally gets alerts to those within a half-mile radius of the patient, though the vicinity is adjusted depending on how many potential responders are nearby. If there aren’t enough within a half-mile, for example, the alert would go out in a wider area, he said.

PulsePoint is free and available on both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. It currently has more than 1 million users in 2,500 communities across the U.S.

Naperville implemented this in June of 2016

Tags: , ,