In recent years, Denmark has seen the fatality rate for out-of-home heart attacks slowly dwindle to record lows.
Aside from telling these volunteers where a heart attack might be happening, Heartrunner also helps them find nearby automated external defibrillators—or AED’s—a type of defibrillator that can jumpstart a person’s heart back to its normal rhythm.
In the decade since Heartrunner’s been on the market, the survival rate for out-of-hospital heart attacks has slowly been climbing, it rose from just under 4% in 2001 to over 12% a decade later.
Meanwhile, a recent study of at-home heart attacks among American patients during the pandemic put our survival rate closer to 10%.