A dispatcher at the Hangzhou Emergency Medical Center gives CPR guidance through a video system on June 18, during a media tour themed "Improving the Medical Experience and Enhancing Patient Satisfaction" organized by the Health Commission of Zhejiang Province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The Health Commission of Zhejiang Province is committed to developing faster and smarter emergency response capabilities.

At the Hangzhou Emergency Medical Center and Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the staff are improving their pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency responses to bring more benefits to patients.

When citizens dial 120 for emergency help, they not only receive professional telephone guidance but can also obtain real-time and precise online first-aid guidance through videos, according to Zhang Jungen, director of the Hangzhou Emergency Medical Center.

Aiming to improve emergency response services, the Hangzhou Emergency Medical Center developed a first-aid video guidance system in 2022, which became fully operational in February 2023.

The system allows efficient first aid to begin immediately once the video is connected between the caller on site and the dispatcher in the emergency center. The video enables the dispatcher to make a more accurate judgment of the patient's condition and provide correct first-aid guidance, particularly for CPR.

The video guidance system has broken through the limitations of traditional voice guidance, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of remote identification and guidance for CPR and other emergency measures.

In cases where video guidance is provided, the on-site resuscitation accuracy has surged from about 20 percent to over 96 percent. In 2023, the CPR success rate under video guidance was 12.4 percent, while that without video guidance was 3.1 percent.

Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital in Hangzhou has developed the eCART (cardiac arrest rapid response) platform to improve in-hospital emergency responses.

The eCART platform is a digital call platform to convey emergency rescue tasks to every member of the hospital's cardiac arrest rapid response team in the shortest time possible. The team is composed of senior experts from the intensive care medicine department, emergency medicine department, and anesthesiology department, as well as nursing team leaders.

With the implementation of the new platform, emergency rescue teams are now able to arrive at the scene via dedicated elevators in just 3 minutes, compared to 5 minutes in the past, according to Zhou Yucheng, deputy director of the medical department.

Out of 140 emergency incidents, 116 patients were transferred to the intensive care medicine department for further treatment after their vital signs stabilized, and 64 out of 81 cardiac arrest cases were successfully resuscitated.