Carlin Williams:          The Aortic Alert System is a communication tool, in essence. What is does is it allows the outside hospital, or an in-house provider, such as the emergency room physician, a way of communicating with highly trained cardiothoracic surgeons or vascular surgeons about an aortic issue, such as an aortic dissection or an aortic rupture.

This program is unique to UVA in that it allows the hospitals that are under UVA's catchment area to directly communicate in real time to the hospital and those personnel that need to take care of an aortic issue. 

The past medical history of the patient, the past surgical history of the patient, those are all known to the emergency department.

The imaging from the outside hospital, whether it be CAT scans or x-rays, or what have you, are sent almost immediately to University of Virginia. They are made available to the cardiothoracic and vascular surgery teams, so that they can review them before the patient gets here. 

The Aortic Alert System is not only for those who are coming from outside hospitals, but if a patient were to come unexpectedly into the emergency department, these highly specialized teams, such as the cardiothoracic and vascular surgery teams, are immediately notified via their pagers. They call in so that they are able to directly communicate to each other in sort of a multidisciplinary arena about the patient that shows up unexpectedly in the emergency department. 

This process usually takes minutes and works very efficiently.