Recently we crossed an important clinical milestone: the transport of our 300th patient on ECMO. Since beginning ECMO transport in 2011, our program has grown organically to meet the needs of hospitals across New England caring for patients in the most dire condition.
Of the 300 ECMO patients we have transported, the vast majority have had a life-threatening event prior to our arrival, requiring a highly complex clinical mission involving advanced coordination, stabilization, and critical care expertise.
Specifically, 43% percent of our ECMO patients had experienced a cardiac arrest prior to transport, and 21% were receiving extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR)—some of the sickest patients we encounter in critical care medicine.
Reaching 300 ECMO transports reflects the growth of our program and the trust placed in our teams to care for some of the sickest patients, using advanced technology, clinical expertise, and teamwork to save lives.
CARE IN COMPLEX & UNPREDICTABLE ENVIRONMENTS
Our teams operate in highly variable and demanding environments, including more than 40 hospitals across New England. They respond not only to intensive care units, but also to cardiac cath labs and operating rooms, where they must be agile, collaborative, and grounded in the foundations of high-quality ECMO care.
Once on scene, a significant amount of time is devoted to patient stabilization and meticulous transport planning. In many cases, teams spend nearly twice as long preparing and packaging a patient for safe transport as they do in actual transit. This careful preparation is essential when managing patients supported by ECMO, where even small changes in physiology or equipment can have serious consequences.
Expertise Across the Full Spectrum of ECMO
Because the patients we transport on ECMO are not “planned” cases, but are placed on ECMO as a last, lifesaving intervention, our clinicians must be proficient across multiple cannulation strategies, including venoarterial (VA), venovenous (VV), venoarterial-venous (VAV), and venovenous-arterial (VVA) ECMO—each configuration carrying its own physiologic considerations, risks, and troubleshooting challenges.
Our ECMO patients are among the sickest and most complex we care for—but they’re also some of our greatest success stories. Patients once fully supported for blood flow and oxygenation have gone on to walk out of the hospital weeks later.
Training & Clinical Preparedness
Each mission brings uncertainty, and our teams never fully know the patient’s condition or the complexity of the situation they will encounter upon arrival. For these reasons, comprehensive training is critical to patient safety. Our crews are grounded in the fundamentals of high-quality ECMO care while remaining prepared to adapt to complex and evolving scenarios in real time. It is this combination of deep clinical knowledge, technical expertise, and adaptability that defines our ECMO program—and something we are immensely proud of.
BMF ECMO TRANSPORT STATS
- Median age: 54, with 7 pediatric patients
- 77% by ground, 23% by rotor wing
- 44 sending Hospitals, 11 receiving hospitals
- Median time at the bedside: 102 min
- Median time en route: 55 min
- Cannulation breakdown:
- 76% VA for cardiac or cardiac and respiratory failure
- 20% VV for pure respiratory failure
- 3% VAV for cardiac failure that later develops a significant respiratory component
- .6% VVA for inability to get adequate flows with standard VA
