Door Balloon Door-to-Balloon Time

The quality indicator examined herein is the measurement known as door-to-balloon time, which is a defined element in emergency cardiac care that refers to the time from patient entrance to an emergency department to the time a catheter wire passes the lesion responsible for a myocardial infarction. An increase in door-to-balloon time carries with it an increased risk for tissue damage and thus more permanent complications and detriments to patients' health, and thus certain standards have been set in an effort to promote best practices and measure the efficacy of emergency department treatment of myocardial infarctions. The current recommendation for door-to-balloon time is ninety minutes or less, and this is a number that should be strived for with every patient, not simply as an average for the emergency treatment of myocardial...

Using door-to-balloon time as a measure of care efficacy and quality provides a direct and quantifiable method that can be easily tracked over time and in response to various improvement efforts and changes to policy or practice.
According to the six observations included in this chart, the emergency department in question appears to be providing excellent care as measured by door-to-balloon time, with the longest time measured (sixty-four minutes) still substantially lower than the current recommended maximum time of ninety minutes -- only two thirds of this time, in fact. The shortest tome observed for door-to-balloon achievement, twenty-five minutes, is especially impressive and was likely of…