The New York-based startup has struck a deal with Avive Solutions, a San Francisco-based health-care technology company, to improve out-of-hospital emergency responses to heart attacks.
Avive makes automated external defibrillators (AED) that, according to a company video, can be stored in such places as offices, homes and public areas, allowing quicker deployment of the machines. Avive's technology is still under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is not yet for sale in this country.
Even so, the goal of this new partnership is to use RapidSOS emergency communication technology to enable 911 dispatchers to quickly locate the Avive AEDs nearest to the person suffering the cardiac arrest. The machines could be brought to the emergency locations by people who are not first responders but have access to those AEDs, as shown in the video.
That could prove especially useful in rural areas, though both companies are promoting this partnership as offering much-needed help to all types of municipalities and regions.
"Every day (about) 1,000 people of all ages, races and genders die from cardiac arrest outside of the hospital in the U.S. alone, and tragically, survival rates have not appreciably improved over the last two decades," said Sameer Jafri, president of Avive Solutions, in that press release. "We are excited to partner with an innovator like RapidSOS to completely rethink the delivery of life-saving therapy to people suffering cardiac arrest in their greatest time of need."
Cardiac arrests that take place outside of hospitals kill some 320,000 people annually in the U.S., according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation. Time stands as a major factor in who lives and dies, with survival rates declining by up to 10 percent for every minute that passes without a defibrillation shock. About 2 percent of cardiac arrest cases involve such shocks before the arrival of EMTs, according to the press release announcing this new deal.
This move represents just the latest effort by RapidSOS to capture more of the public health technology landscape via partnerships with other companies such as Avive. In July, for instance, the company announced the launch of a digital network designed so that public safety agencies can have more access to new technologies from software providers to help officials improve emergency responses.
Think of that almost as one-stop shopping for public safety professionals. That sense of centralization also attaches itself to the other recent deal involving RapidSOS. New Jersey-based NICE said it has partnered with RapidSOS on a project to offer better data analysis for emergency communication centers.
NICE will integrate its Inform Elite product — an incident information management tool that launched in 2017 — into the RapidSOS platform emergency communications centers (ECCs). That will help those public safety agency professionals keep single, cohesive records of incidents and use what NICE called “intelligent performance dashboards” for emergency response work.
“As ECCs move into a next-gen world, technology is opening up new avenues for accessing and sharing data,” said Karin Marquez, RapidSOS' senior director of public safety, in a press release. “As we discover new ways to leverage data to improve emergency response, we’re also looking forward to partnering with NICE to create more value for our mutual customers and enable them to benefit from RapidSOS data in other ways.”
According to Crunchbase, RapidSOS has raised more than $205 million since 2012.
