Weld County residents can now be alerted and choose to respond if capable when people nearby go into sudden cardiac arrest.
The Weld County Regional Communications Center — with help from the Greeley Fire Department — launched PulsePoint on Monday, an app that alerts users when someone is having a cardiac arrest emergency within a half-mile. If the user is in a position to help, they can respond and provide aid while emergency personnel are en route.
“On average, every minute or so that someone goes without CPR once they’ve suffered from a cardiac arrest, their chances of survival decrease by about 10%,” Greeley Fire Department community education and risk education specialist Bryan Eisen said. “So, the main focus is getting someone who is CPR trained to that person as quickly as possible to increase chances of survival.”
Cardiac arrest
Though often used interchangeably, cardiac arrest differs from a myocardial infarction — or heart attack. A heart attack occurs when blood flow to the heart is blocked, likely caused by circulation issues. Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops beating completely — with the leading cause being Ventricular fibrillation, a type of irregular heart rhythm.
Stop Cardiac Arrest — a sudden cardiac arrest prevention and support group — likens a heat attack to a plumbing issue and cardiac arrest to an electrical issue.
On average, 1,000 people suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests daily in the U.S. Roughly 90% of those are fatal. When in a hospital, the survival rate more than doubles, up to roughly 21% — meaning every second counts.
“Enabling bystanders to get there sooner and get hands on the chest to do those chest compressions, it can really make a massive difference,” Eisen said.
PulsePoint has been around since 2011, and many municipalities, counties and agencies already use the technology. Fort Collins has employed the technology for more than a decade, and Loveland implemented it in 2021.
How we got here
Greeley Fire Chief Brian Kuznik originally pitched the idea to bring it this way in Fall 2022, with the idea it would be funded through the Weld Trust — and implemented with the help of the Weld Legacy Foundation — as they have worked together on similar programs in the past.
In 2013, the Weld Community Foundation — then known as the North Colorado Medical Center Foundation — was paramount in Greeley becoming just the second city in Colorado to earn the designation of a “Heart Safe City.”
Finding funding from a county-wide source would also give the program a greater reach, as it could be implemented throughout Weld, instead of just in Greeley.
When funding issues arose, Kuznik pivoted to the Weld County Regional Communications Center — with funding from the Weld County 911 authority board using the 911 tax, the department said. While not as cost effective as a grant, the partnership still allows the app to be implemented county wide.
Who can help
A bystander who renders aid to someone is covered under the Good Samaritan Law, as long as they act in good faith, don’t accept any compensation and all the care they provide is within the scope of their training and capabilities.
“We want to encourage people to do as much as they can in that type of situation within their reasonable bounds,” Eisen said.
While those reasonable bounds differ from person to person, Eisen said someone wanting to sign up for PulsePoint doesn’t need to be CPR certified.
Maybe someone has been previously trained and still has the skills but has had no need to renew the certification since it expired. Or maybe they took a family and friends CPR class offered by the Greeley Fire Department — which teaches all the basics but does not come with a certification so the department can offer them for free.
“We encourage everyone to come to those classes,” Eisen said. “That way, we can get them some time to do hands-on training. We can inform them about the right way to do this stuff.”
Everyone who participates also gets a “CPR responder pack” that includes gloves, a facial barrier and other items to help in case someone needs to perform life-saving care. While the classes are meant for Greeley residents as an effort to increase public health and safety within the city, Eisen said he’s not checking IDs and turning people away at the door.
“We’re really trying to look at this and prepare people in totality to be able to respond confidently to these incidents,” he said.
Though most people typically only think of firefighters and first responders after an emergency takes place, two of the Greeley Fire Department’s three core tenets are prevention and preparedness.
“I think a lot of people think of the fire department as a response (the third tenet) agency — and obviously they have good reason to think that,” Eisen said. “But we recognize the update portion of our job. A large part of our focus is trying to prepare for these events and try to prevent them.”
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