What is Telestroke?

TeleStroke is a newer concept in the stroke community. Something that we offer here at Premier, across all of our hospitals. It allows specialized physicians that are trained in identifying stroke and treating stroke to be at the bedside, in virtual terms, so we can speed up care. Telemedicine allows our trained and board-certified, fellowship trained stroke neurologists to transport themselves, if you will, to any bedside, whether it be in our system or within other hospitals that are now connected with our system for this stroke care.  As we alluded to earlier, treatment of stroke is all time dependent. And the faster you do it, the better the outcome for the patient. So it made perfect sense that because there are so few trained neurology specialists out there, it's very difficult to have one of these individuals stationed at every hospital that a patient might arrive with stroke symptoms. So we have instead used technology to bring that physician to the bedside via a computer and allow them to both discuss the care with the patient and the patient's family, to examine the patient with the help of the ER physician and the nursing staff at that local hospital. And then make critical decisions on whether they should get IV therapy for stroke, which is a difficult decision to make often times, for those who don't do it frequently. So the stroke doctor is a very critical piece of that team that allows him to say this is somebody that would benefit or identify someone both that may benefit from further therapy like stent retrieval or endovascular therapy for stroke, and would then send a helicopter to bring that patient to the main hospital which offers those surgical treatments of stroke. Or in a third benefit it would be to identify someone who might be part of a research trial that offers a brand-new therapy that isn't able to be offered without this type of interaction and identification quickly of those who might be qualified for clinical trials.