Announcing Montana’s first Mobile ECMO for Lung Rescue

Just three months after announcing the creation of the region’s first and only mobile extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) program, Billings Clinic and Community Medical Center are honored to announce the first successful patient transport in Montana.

ECMO serves as life support for patients whose heart or lungs can’t perform their normal functions. This technology provides a bridge to recovery for patients with reversible lung failure – such as respiratory distress due to the flu, pneumonia, drowning or pancreatitis. The goal is to stabilize patients long enough to fix the problem that caused their illness and minimize trauma to lung tissue so they can recover. Billings Clinic’s Mobile ECMO Team transports this technology & highly trained medical professionals to patients throughout Montana and Wyoming to initiate mobile heart-lung bypass so they can be flown to a higher level of care.

“In addition to being a medical first for the state of Montana and the region, this is a significant advancement for the care of critically ill patients who would otherwise have no other therapeutic options available,” said Bradley Genovese, MD, Billings Clinic cardiothoracic surgeon and surgical director for the ECMO program. “The people of our region deserve the same high-level care no matter where they live, and this is another way we can help to make that a reality.”

Earlier this month, the Billings Clinic team completed its first off-site mobile ECMO patient air transport to Billings. The patient initially arrived at Community Medical Center in Missoula with severe respiratory failure. Eric Feucht, MD, a critical care physician at Community, first recognized the urgent need for ECMO but the patient was too unstable to transport. Working with interventional cardiologist Morgan Kellogg, MD, with the Billings Clinic Heart and Vascular Center at Community, he contacted Billings Clinic to initiate their mobile ECMO team. The team flew to Missoula to initiate ECMO and the Billings Clinic MedFlight air ambulance program safely transported the patient back to Billings. After several days, the patient no longer required the use of ECMO on their care and recovery journey.

“Having mobile ECMO in Montana is an enormous benefit for patients who have become so sick that transporting them without ECMO would be dangerous,” said Dr. Feucht. “Prior to having this service available we would have tried to transport the patient out of state – if they were stable enough to make the trip. If they were not stable to transport, clinical outcomes often deteriorated.” 

ECMO has been available in a limited number of hospital-based settings throughout the region, but local hospitals have not had the ability to transport unstable patients to a higher level of care.

In states like Montana and Wyoming, where the distance between hospitals, communities and trauma centers can stretch hundreds of miles, the ability to deliver and coordinate complex care such as ECMO to where the patient is can mean the difference between life and death. Now, when patients have severe but potentially reversible respiratory failure and no other treatments are effective, treating providers can contact the Mobile ECMO team from Billings Clinic to determine if the patient is a candidate for ECMO and transport to Billings.

“It’s a multi-disciplinary team of surgeons, perfusionists, nurses and pulmonary critical care physicians and the flight team who make this happen,” Dr. Genovese said. “Mobile ECMO is not something that grows overnight. We can offer it here because we have already established such strong heart and ECMO programs.”

Billings Clinic is the first ECMO provider in Montana, Wyoming and the western Dakotas, with most ECMO patients coming from outside the Billings area. In April of 2024, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded Billings Clinic with $11 million in grants to, among other projects to expand complex care in the region, fund the creation of the mobile ECMO program.

“I moved to Montana and I’m raising my family here,” Genovese said. “I want all the same standards of care for them that would be available in any major city. It’s a technology that is lifesaving for the sickest patients. It should be available in every major city and mobile ECMO allows us to work with the unique aspects of rural Montana.”