How WhatsApp and a clot-buster eased rural access to heart care

31 MAY 2026

Since July 2025, the Punjab government has implemented Mission AMRIT (short for ‘Acute Myocardial Reperfusion in Time’), where sub-divisional hospital and district hospital staff — the spokes — are equipped with drugs, equipment, and training to conduct thrombolysis under the guidance of a cardiologist or a specialist in the medical colleges, which are the hubs.
When a person with STEMI reaches the spoke within up to 12 hours of a heart attack and no complications, they are thrombolysed and referred to a hub for further angiography and angioplasty.
An echocardiogram (ECG) result WhatsApped to the hospital’s medicine consultant diagnosed it as an ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI) and asked the EMO to administer the drug tenecteplase.
STEMI is a severe, life-threatening heart attack with significant coronary artery blockage.
The injected drug tenecteplase is used for thrombolysis, or to dissolve the clot.
The patient received the injection within half an hour of his ECG results and soon felt better.
After the successful Tamil Nadu STEMI pilot showed a hub and spoke model could reduce mortality, it was implemented in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and elsewhere.
But including only the government hospitals as hubs reduces the model’s efficacy.