Royal Philips has received CE marking for its cardiac troponin I (cTnI) blood test with the Minicare I-20 handheld device. Minicare cTnI is designed to deliver lab-comparable test results in less than 10 minutes.
The test result—garnered from a droplet of blood—is intended to be delivered while the patient is being assessed and having their medical history taken. “Minicare I-20 is designed to help care providers to reduce time to treatment and reduce time to discharge of patients, thereby helping to decrease crowding in the emergency department and leading to better use of hospital resources,” says Marcel van Kasteel, chief executive officer of Handheld Diagnostics at Philips.
Current guidelines for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction require blood test results of the biomarker cardiac troponin for the 90% of patients who present at the emergency department with chest pain but are not diagnosed by an electrocardiogram.
“Blood samples are usually analysed in the hospital laboratory, which can easily take more than an hour to get the result back to the emergency department physician. Point-of-care testing can significantly help to reduce the turnaround time,” says Paul Collinson, consultant chemical pathologist at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (London, UK).
The Minicare I-20 was tested in real-life acute care settings within the European project Lab2Go, a consortium of European hospitals. According to a company release, the study showed the potential of the Philips Minicare cTnI to accurately measure cTnI values, near the patient in the emergency department, with a turn-around-time of less than 10 minutes.
Minicare I-20 is also designed to allow for direct transfer of data to laboratory or hospital information systems.
