If I may clarify some of the misunderstandings of what happens in a typical emergency. If a patient is clutching their chest, we're calling our ambulance servi

If I may clarify some of the misunderstandings of what happens in a typical emergency. If a patient is clutching their chest, we're calling our ambulance service, not doing an EKG. However, the great majority of heart attacks don't present with crushing chest pain. If they did, Emergency Care would be easy, and EM docs wouldn't have had to do 11 years of schooling to recognize and treat these subtleties. The patient that the TechCrunch article is referring too had a subtle tachypnea (slightly elevated respiratory rate because the dying heart muscle causes the blood to become acidic and so the body compensates by blowing off Co2) and a vague abdominal discomfort with a lot of confounding factors like constipation. This patient would not get an EKG in the overwhelming majority of nursing homes in the country, and it's not their fault! It's just because the system doesn't allow for the evaluation the patient may need. Also - an EKG is quite easy to do - this is a non-issue.