Cooper University Health Care announced the launch of a pioneering Mobile Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Transport Program, a move that brings “last-resort” life support technology directly to the bedsides of patients in community hospitals across the region.
The program—a collaboration between Cooper’s Center for Critical Care Services, the Cooper Transfer Center, Cooper EMS, and the Level 1 Trauma Program—allows a specialized medical team to stabilize and transport patients suffering from life-threatening heart or lung failure who are otherwise too unstable to move.
ECMO is an advanced form of life support that takes over the work of the heart and lungs. By pumping blood out of the body, oxygenating it, and circulating it back in, the system allows a patient’s vital organs time to rest and heal.
Previously, patients needed to be at a major quaternary center like Cooper to receive this treatment. Now, Cooper can deploy a multidisciplinary team—including physicians, perfusion specialists, and critical care nurses—to initiating ECMO at a referring hospital before transporting the patient back to Camden.
“Our vision is to ensure that geography is never a barrier to life-saving therapy,” Dr. Nitin Puri, director of Critical Care Services at Cooper said. “By extending ECMO capabilities beyond our walls, we are building a truly regional system of advanced mechanical support.”
The program’s impact was recently demonstrated in a successful mission involving a patient in Vineland. The individual was suffering from severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and was too unstable for a standard ventilator-assisted transfer.
The Cooper Mobile ECMO team traveled to the Vineland facility, initiated the ECMO process at the bedside, and safely transported the stabilized patient to Cooper University Hospital. The patient has since recovered and been discharged.
The ability to perform “mobile cannulation” (the surgical insertion of ECMO tubes) is considered a hallmark of the nation’s leading academic health systems. This new capability solidifies Cooper’s status as the premier provider of complex critical care in South Jersey.
