How Tamil Nadu Slashed Heart Attack Response Time to 13 Minutes — Even in Villages
28 April 2025
What if a person suffers a heart attack in a remote village & the local health centre doesn’t have a cardiologist or the infrastructure to do an angioplasty — a procedure to remove blood clots from heart arteries?
Tackling this problem, Tamil Nadu is rewriting the rules of emergency cardiac care in remote pockets with a bold, life-saving, hub-and-spoke model.
This model links 20 cutting-edge cardiac cath labs to 188 hospitals, ensuring timely treatment even in remote areas. The result? A 386% surge in critical heart procedures.
Every second counts in a heart attack. The ‘golden hour’, the first 60 minutes, can determine life or death. Delayed treatment means irreversible damage.
In rural areas, this delay can costs lives. With limited access to emergency cardiac care, patients often had to travel for long hours to reach a specialized hospital.
TN's new model has changed the game, ensuring heart attack patients get emergency cardiac care swiftly, no matter where they are.
Patients first arrive at primary health centers (PHCs), where symptoms are diagnosed, ECGs are taken immediately, and the results are reviewed remotely by expert cardiologists.
These specialists then recommend clot-dissolving drugs to local healthcare personnel, buying time for the patient to get to a bigger hospital.
Once stabilised, patients are rapidly transferred to one of the 20 advanced cardiac cath labs for further treatment like angiograms and angioplasties.
The entire process is optimized to save time and maximize survival. And the impact has been massive. In just 3 years, procedures like angioplasties have skyrocketed by a staggering 386%.
Survival rates have improved drastically too. 97.7% of patients were stable after receiving emergency care. Only 2.2% did not survive, and just 0.1% passed away in transit.
The average time from symptom onset to recieving life-saving medication was just 13.09 minutes. And to reach a specialized hospital? 46.25 minutes. A dramatic improvement in response time!
The benefits also extend beyond heart attacks. The Makkalai Thedi Maruthuvam initiative under this model is also addressing hypertension & diabetes, detecting an estimated 1.7 million cases.
This is a model for not just India, but for the world. By combining technology, rapid response, and expert care, it has shown that accessible, affordable emergency cardiac treatment is possible, even in the remotest areas.
The success of this initiative shows that when innovation meets intent, real change happens. Can this model be expanded across India to save even more lives?