(light music)
- I think that all of the strategies,
both from Get With The Guidelines and Target: Stroke,
raises the bar on your patient care.
The face of stroke looks a lot like this room.
It doesn't discriminate race, color, creed.
It just affects everybody, every time, at any time.
One of my favorite stories is a 42 year old woman
who was crossing the street on her lunch hour.
A very busy street in Los Angeles,
and she actually fell in the middle of the street.
She suffered a stroke in the middle of the street.
They brought her to Cedars.
We worked her through our system very quickly
and she was given tPA, using a lot of the strategies
quite frankly from Target: Stroke.
That's how we got her through the system so quickly.
And she was taken upstairs for a thrombectomy,
and when she woke up, she came in
with no speech and no use of her left side,
and when she woke up, she was completely 100%.
So that was a great scene, that was a great story.
We were looking at pursuing primary stroke certification.
And when you do the research, the first thing
that pops up is Get With The Guidelines.
So we reached out, I reached out
to the American Heart Association.
I was on the team when we first started the stroke program,
and I actually put the first patient
into Get With The Guidelines database.
I personally put the first patient
into Get With the Guidelines database many years ago,
and now we have over 8,000 patients in our database,
which is really pretty amazing.
We had no idea how big this would get.
We had no idea how this would grow.
We had no idea we would be one of
the largest stroke programs in the country.
I'm really passionate about it
cause I think that Target: Stroke
changed the way medical centers
treat their stroke patients,
and that's a really big deal.
It saved a lot of people.
This initiative really appealed to us
because even though we had already formalized
our informal processes in terms of stroke patients
getting through the pathway, coming in
through the emergency room, getting to CT,
getting treated quickly, we did not
begin to really drill down and look at all of the steps
and everything it took until Target: Stroke.
And we realized, "Wait a minute,
"we could really save time here."
We could really, sort of, accomplish this this way,
and I think through Target: Stroke,
it helped us to really create a better system.
We probably would not have
maybe drilled down and shortened our...
Median door to needle time was like maybe 64 minutes,
and now it's like 42 minutes, that's amazing.
Because time really is brain,
and every second that goes by that the brain
is starving for blood flow, waiting for tPA,
every second that goes by, you lose brain cells.
Functional outcomes as a result of Target: Stroke
have really gotten so much better
because patients are being treated faster,
so if we could treat a patient 10 minutes faster,
15 minutes faster, that could be the difference
of knowing your own image in a mirror.
I mean, that could be knowing your children's names.
I mean, that is life changing for people.
I think a positive part of working
with the American Heart Association
for us is the resources.
All of the webinars, all of
the educational resources online,
even the patient information and education
that we do with our patients at Cedar-Sinai
essentially all comes from the American Heart Association.
So we utilize all of those resources,
both online and even in terms of
calling them for a question or a concern
or what do we do about this or...
They're really unbelievably responsive.
They'll answer immediately.
I know if it was a family member of mine,
I would want them to come to Cedar-Sinai
for their stroke care, because I know
that they use Target: Stroke initiatives.
I know that they work closely with
the American Heart Association.
I know that they have the
finest physicians and nurses around,
and all of those things together.
It's not just one thing, it's all of those things.