Seattle man is saved by an app that connects cardiac arrest victims with citizens who know CPR

Last Friday, 60 year old Steve DeMont was doing his usual bike commute from Seattle’s Bryant neighborhood to his job at Expedia in Bellevue. But when he arrived at the bus stop near UW Medicine, something went terribly wrong.

“I stopped the bike, I got off and I immediately felt lightheaded,” says DeMont. “Next thing I know, I’m in the ICU.”

Steve had a heart attack.

But thanks to an alert citizen and an app called PulsePoint he’s doing just fine. Fine enough that he just did an interview with me from his hospital bed after having a procedure to install a defibrillator in his chest.

But before we get deeper into DeMont’s story, let’s talk about PulsePoint. It’s an app invented by Richard Price, who was a California fire chief for 33 years.
Price was having lunch at a restaurant when he heard sirens and eventually saw an EMT pull up at the building. Turns out someone had gone into cardiac arrest. It bothered Price to know that he could have administered CPR and used the AED he had in his car if he would have known.

This prompted his to invent PulsePoint, to connect people trained in CPR with nearby people who need it.

“When somebody calls 911 and reports somebody who’s unconscious, and the dispatcher determines that that’s likely a cardiac arrest, they dispatch resources,” explains Price. “But our software that’s running in the dispatch center looks to see if we have anybody who is trained in CPR in the immediate vicinity. We notify them and provide them a map so they can see where the patient is located. We also show any nearby access to public defibrillators, AEDs, so they can either start CPR or use that AED while the professional responders are on their way to the scene.”

Anyone trained in CPR is encouraged to download the app, because the more people who can be contacted, the greater the chance a life can be saved.

Back to DeMont, he says he was originally approached by a medical student walking by.

“Apparently he was coming off the light rail from the UW station to head over here for a lecture and he saw me slumped over my bike,” DeMont says. “He’s the one who started CPR. Then there was a nurse coming off duty who got an alert from this app on her phone called PulsePoint. She immediately dropped everything and ran over and assisted him. Then the medics showed up and continued CPR.”

Price says in the five years since the app was launched, they’ve text 13,000 alerts to CPR trained app subscribers.

“This is the 2nd one in Seattle this month. So it does happen relatively frequently.”

He says it’s so important for someone to be able to get to a cardiac arrest patient before paramedics arrive.

“Cardiac arrest is one of those rare medical conditions where time is really of the essence,” says Price. “Within several minutes you’re going to start having damage to your organs, damage to your brain. At about 10 minutes you have no chance of survival. Which is why citizen CPR is so important. We just cannot get professional responders there fast enough and it’s what drives very low survival rates with cardiac arrest, if CPR is not started.”

DeMont knows that without the two people who stepped in to help him, he may not be alive today.

“I just really want to give credit where credit is due and I want to try and do this unemotionally. Madeline and Zack who responded, these people are probably in their mid-20’s. They’re very engaged. I’m 60 and I don’t mean to be an old curmudgeon. But you’re walking around town, you see people on their cell phones, they’re not paying attention. They’re not only young people, it cuts across the whole demographic. These people are amazing.” DeMont’s voice breaks. “It really restored a lot of my faith in the youth of this country. I know that sounds like I’m being an old man, but there’s such a disconnect because we have all this technology. I think these young people are very remarkable.”

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