
Jared Conley, MD, PhD, MPH
and Andrew Chu, MD
HTL Project | 2020
The HTL has entered into an exciting and ongoing collaboration with the American Heart Association (AHA), which has resulted in an important digital health project that will assist clinicians with managing patients with emergent heart conditions that require Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). The AHA is the longstanding go-to resource for ACLS. Over many years, it has published evidence-based protocols that every clinician in America follows when responding to a cardiac arrest, as well as other life-threatening cardiac conditions. Until now, these protocols have only been available on paper or on the web and, as a result, have been cumbersome to access urgently at the point of care. The pandemic exposed an urgent need to make this information more readily available to the many physicians already on or pressed into frontline service across the US. Recognizing this need, HTL collaborated with the AHA and licensed their ACLS content to build an app that was recently released to physicians nation-wide on the iOS App Store. The app is a critical resource for physicians to reference AHA-vetted cardiac emergency protocols, as well as provide enhanced functionalities to run the “code” — including the ability to log CPR, prompt the delivery of a defibrillation shock and track the administration of crucial medications. Importantly, the app also includes critical protocol updates for COVID-19 that were introduced by the AHA in April 2020.
The MGH ACLS app is available for download from the App Store and Google Play.