For a patient like Jean Hilliard in 2024, arriving with a pulse of 12 beats per minute and profound hypothermia, the likely approach in a well-equipped modern facility would involve active core warming — either through ECMO or through other active rewarming techniques such as warm fluid irrigation of body cavities — rather than external heating pads.

The rewarming would be monitored with continuous cardiac monitoring to detect arrhythmias early and respond immediately.

Laboratory monitoring of kidney function, electrolytes, and other indicators of organ function would be continuous.

Whether this more aggressive approach would have produced a better outcome for Jean Hilliard is not clear — her outcome with the 1980 approach was, after all, essentially complete recovery.

But the same approach applied to patients who do not recover with external rewarming alone — patients whose hearts cannot sustain even a minimal rhythm through the rewarming process — has saved people who would have died under 1980 protocols.