The General Assembly finds and declares that:
(1) Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the United States and in Georgia;
(2) Georgia ranks as the thirty-eighth worst in the nation for numbers of deaths from cardiovascular disease;
(3) There were 79,901 deaths in Georgia in 2015, and cardiovascular disease (excluding stroke) accounted for 23.6 percent of such deaths;
(4) Approximately 40 percent of cardiac deaths occur suddenly, the result of a heart attack that is manifested by an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest;
(5) As of 2016, several states, but notably Arizona and Washington, have designated hospitals that are expert in cardiovascular disease care, much in the way that Georgia has stroke and trauma centers; Arizona and Washington have some of the lowest death rates for patients who have heart attacks, in part due to their designated cardiac centers; and
(6) Therefore, it is in the best interest of the residents of this state to establish a program to identify emergency cardiac care centers throughout the state to ensure the rapid triage, assessment, treatment, and transport of patients experiencing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest or heart attack or its complications.