North Carolina team of doctors, nurses, hospitals and emergency medical service workers has come up with a way to provide faster, more effective treatment for heart attack patients.

Implementation of a program in North Carolina to increase the rate of coronary reperfusion (restoring blood flow to the heart muscle) for heart attack significantly improved the quality of care these patients received, according to a study in JAMA being released early online to coincide with its release at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting.

Contrary to some previous studies, rural hospitals in Iowa do provide quality care for patients with heart attacks and do not have higher death rates when compared to urban hospitals, report University of Iowa researchers.