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- So it's a no brainer.
Everybody who's serious about stroke care,
heart attack care, should be using Get With The Guidelines.
It will absolutely improve your hospital's
ability to deliver the best care available
and give you the tools that you need to
look critically at your system to
find out why you're not achieving
your goals on a day in, day out basis.
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American Heart Association and it's
Get With The Guideline programs are now starting to expand
beyond the walls of the hospitals
and really taking a look at what we can do to improve
systems of care so,
as is typical,
our hospital thought for a long time that
it was doing a really good job taking care of people.
So when it came time to look at
how we were doing taking care of stroke patients,
we realized that we didn't really have
any hardcore information to help
us make better treatment decisions.
So we decided that it would be useful
to use a national database system
to gather information so that we could
measure the quality of the care that we were delivering
and the obvious choice from the beginning
was the Get With The Guidelines program
from the American Heart Association.
Get With The Guidelines was born and bred
by physicians and other providers who understand
what it means to deliver excellence in care.
The information that we gather
using Get With The Guidelines has genuine clinical meaning
and allows us to look critically at our program
and make good decisions about how we can do things better.
Well, the really, the changes have been amazing.
From the beginning, what we started doing
is raising the awareness of what stroke looks like
and also beginning to help people to understand that it
really is an emergency and that time is brain.
So that gave us the tools that we needed
to start looking at how our hospital functions
and figure out what the barriers were
that were making it hard to treat
people quickly in a time sensitive manner.
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Well, Target: Stroke was developed in order
to encourage hospitals to start really start looking
at how they can treat patients more quickly
because there's a huge body of evidence
that gets bigger all the time that tells us
that the faster we get clot buster into our patients,
the more likely they are to have a good outcome.
And it turns out that that's the hardest part
about setting up a system of care is
making it go quickly because there are--
Every single case presents it's own unique set of problems.
So, Target: Stroke gave us the incentive
to bulldoze all those barriers
and get the patient taken care of first
and worry about other little problems later.
So, when we first started taking care of stroke patients,
we were lucky to see a patient
eligible for clot buster more than once a month
and our ability to treat them wasn't very good
so all together we probably treated five or six patients
in the first year of the program.
That might have increased by a couple
patients per year over the first few years
but once the program really started settling in,
we started seeing our numbers almost
doubling year by year so that we are
treating a patient every month,
a patient every two weeks.
We're now treating one or two patients every week,
sometimes three or four in a single day,
and we're able to do this time in and time out
in a much faster manner than we used to be able to.
So when we first started, again,
we were lucky if we saw the patient at all
and if everything went perfectly,
we could usually get them treated
within an hour, an hour and a half.
These days we're not happy if we're not looking
at 20 to 30 minutes as the treatment window.
So we've had several patients already
in the past couple of months
who've come in with, what would be devastating strokes,
not seeming to get better with TPA
but when we go in there and
pull the clot out using the stentriever,
I have literally watched patients completely
resolve their stroke symptoms
laying on the angiogram table
and being able to walk out of the hospital
a day or two later with no stroke symptoms whatsoever.
This is a new era in stroke care
that is tremendously exciting
but raises the bar in terms of
our responsibility to make this
care available to everybody in our society.
(upbeat music)