Women's Heart Foundation
Advocacy Campaign
Take Multifunction CardioGram to Heart

Template - letter to legistor

February 2012 Congressman or Senator Name Congressman or Senator Address Congressman or Senator city, state, zip Re: Medicare Approval for Multifunction CardioGram Dear (your legislator's name), Out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest is responsible for taking 1,000 American lives each day. Women are at greater risk of not receiving a correct diagnosis of heart disease early on, as non-invasive tests cannot detect female heart disease. There now exists a new test to remedy this situation - the Multifunction CardioGram (MCG). MCG technology is based on an analysis of a two-lead ECG (leads II and V5) but functions quite differently than the typical ECG done in hospitals or offices. After gathering the ECG signals, MCG digitizes the data and uses an internet-based system to transmit this to a data center for analysis. Six mathematical formulas are applied to yield a matrix of indexes which are compared to similar data from 40,000 patients (50% of whom are women) in a relational database. A detailed report is generated in less than 15 minutes, revealing the patient's coronary obstruction severity score (0-20 with a score of 4 or greater indicating the presence of relevant coronary obstruction of equal to or greater than 70%) for the treating physician to integrate into his plan of care. MCG provides great decision support to the Emergency Room physician who needs to know immediately, with high degree of certainty, whether to discharge a patient with chest pain or admit for further testing such as coronary angiography (the gold standard for diagnosing anatomic blockage of the coronary arteries), or interventional treatment such as a stent. MCG is the world's first application of Applied Systems Engineering to bioelectrical signal processing in modern medicine to receive US FDA approval. I am asking you to contact local Medicare administrators to give voice to the people about heart disease prevention and covering MCG as an excellent technology to prevent unnecessary and often dangerous and expensive cardiac catheterization. TAKING THIS ACTION WILL BENEFIT ALL MEDICARE PATIENTS and will save millions, if not billions, of healthcare dollars and save lives. This is in support the National Million Hearts Campaign with the goal to save a million lives from heart disease and stroke over the next 5 years. Thank you. Signed, (your name, home address and email)