Implementing Department: Department of Health and Family Welfare

In recent years, there has been an increasing concern about the rising prevalence of
coronary artery disease among younger individuals in India, resulting in an extremely high loss of potentially productive years.

STEMI, or ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction, is a critical type of heart attack caused by a sudden and complete blockage of a coronary artery, often due to a blood clot. This obstruction impairs oxygen and nutrient flow to the heart muscle, potentially leading to tissue damage or death.

Earlier in Tamil Nadu, managing STEMI posed significant challenges. Delays in treatment resulted from factors such as a lack of awareness of heart attack symptoms, attempts at self-treatment and a reliance on local healthcare providers without adequate heart assessment tools. Further delays occurred in government hospitals, where consistent thrombolysis administration is not guaranteed even after a STEMI diagnosis, before patients are referred to larger medical centers.

With this in mind, the Tamil Nadu Innovation Initiatives (TANII) fund recommended and invested in the infrastructure strengthening of Tamil Nadu’s successful TAEI-MI cardiac care program, which works on the hub-and-spoke model in the state.

The program aims to minimize system delays and offer appropriate timely reperfusion to all patients with myocardial infarction who enter the system. The program is able to achieve this with the successful implementation of the hub-and-spoke model, where a hub hospitals (with cath lab facilities) will be networked with 8 to 10 spoke hospitals (DHQH/taluk hospitals with ECG/thrombolysis facility) to form an MI cluster.