A medic and his business partner have developed an App for the iPhone that guides doctors through dealing with a heart attack.

The Daily Mail reports that consultant anaesthetist Dr Daniel Low from the Royal United Hospital in Bath developed the App after working alongside air ambulance helicopter pilots who had previously worked for the military. He observed that the pilots referred to instruction cards during in-flight emergency treatments – these so-called ‘flight reference charts’ guided personnel and helped to reduce margins for human error.

After working with the air ambulance, Dr Low joined the Royal United Hospital as a registrar in April 2009 and spent the next eight months developing the heart attack App – known as the iResus – with his business partner, who is an expert in computer software design. The program was developed in association with iMobileMedic.com and the Resuscitation Council (UK), which provides the application to iPhone users free of charge.

'We have already had enquiries from specialists in fields such as stroke, asthma and anaphylaxis – and we are keen to work with other professional bodies to see if we can adapt iResus to distribute their guidelines onto the iPhones of their members,' said Dr Low.

The iResus is now one of the phone’s most popular medical Apps, with 2,500 users having downloaded it in the first week – many of them were doctors in the UK. There have been 1,200 downloads per week on average since then.

The iResus App aims to reduce the risk of human error by prompting clinicians through a checklist of ‘things to do’ while resuscitating critically ill patients who are experiencing or are approaching cardiac arrest.

The prompts vary according to the age and condition of the patient – a more basic version is also available for first aiders.

'Even though doctors and nurses are trained to deal with someone having a cardiac arrest, it's not a situation they will face every day and I thought both medics and patients would benefit from an application such as this,’ said Dr Low.

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