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COLUMBIA - Boone Hospital is now using a new technology in post cardiac arrest cases, the cooling collar. Columbia is the third city in the state to use the cooling collar and Boone Hospital is the first in central Missouri.

The new piece of technology is meant to lower cerebral temperature, which is the temperature in the neck and head region. The lower temperature can help reduce brain damage that can occur during a cardiac arrest, which ultimately can help save lives and also the quality of life.

Boone Hospital Ambulance Supervisor Marc Carr said the hospital implemented mechanical CPR devices in the mid-2000s. He said they dramatically increased their out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rates, but those people were not able to walk out of the hospital due to brain death.

"We found that cooling the brain down as early as possible when the circulation returns increases their chances of walking out of the hospital with the same quality of life they had before the event," Carr said.

The cooling collar is capable of reducing cerebral temperature by 1.7 degrees Celsius in twenty minutes.

Nathan Kline has been a paramedic at Boone Hospital since 2008. He is from New Bloomfield, MO and was an emergency medical technician for five years before becoming a paramedic. He said he expects to see great results from the cooling collar and the main goal is to not only save a life, but preserve the patient's quality of life.

"We basically want people to be able to come home after a situation like this and resume living their normal life," Kline said.

He said he entered the medical field because he enjoys the satisfaction of helping people even if they can't say thank you. He thinks the cooling collar will help get people back to the state they were in before the cardiac arrest.

The ambulance crew said it's excited about the new piece of technology. It said the collar will help make the doctors' jobs more efficient once patients get to the hospital, and it's looking forward to seeing how the collar improves patient care.