Earlier this year, in the weeks before COVID-19 changed life and healthcare as we know it, Latrobe Regional Hospital near Melbourne, Australia, was busy laying the groundwork for a new communication system between their hospital teams and Ambulance Victoria. Over the course of the next few months, Latrobe was able to implement Pulsara for treating patients across multiple departments, including stroke, mental health, pediatrics, trauma—and most pressingly, COVID-19. 

As the world buckled under the weight of COVID-19, emergency protocols were put in place to protect as many people as possible from exposure to the virus. Many of these protocols successfully achieved what they were designed to do. However, there were also many ways in which we didn’t yet fully understand the impacts of our pandemic response protocols.

Australian EMS agency Ambulance Victoria has recently released new research on the specific causes behind one such unintended consequence: increased deaths from sudden cardiac arrest.

For Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) near Melbourne, Australia, streamlining communication has been a major area of focus, both to improve patient care and to strengthen collaboration across its healthcare system. Up until the beginning of 2020, they used a combination of phone calls and pagers to interface among Emergency Services, ED, and hospital staff—resulting in inefficiencies and challenging communication for caregivers.

“Every nine minutes a person in Australia suffers from a new or recurrent stroke. The growing burden of stroke care around the globe highlights the need for advances in treatment, particularly rapid identification of symptoms and quick delivery of definitive care.” 

EMS World recently published an article describing how “Australia is employing new technology to improve stroke coordination and care.” We're honored to say that this new technology is Pulsara!

The article describes how there are limitations to linear care and how this can cause unwanted delays specifically with communication and moving the patient from one area of care to the next. With stroke care, this is not an isolated problem that only affects the US, but is recognized throughout the world.  

When someone suffers a stroke or heart attack, getting the patient to definitive treatment quickly is crucial to their survival and quality of life post-event. But, getting treatment quickly requires communication between EMS, several care teams within the hospital, and sometimes even teams from other hospitals when transfer is required. 

Too often, this communication breaks down at one or many points along the way due to the outdated and non-integrated technology systems those clinicians rely on to relay their information. This antiquated technology, including phone trees, fax machines, pages, sticky notes ... (yes, really), causes critical patient information to be missed, which can contribute to treatment delays and medical errors.

To ameliorate these frustrations, researchers in Australia have conducted a preliminary study with the following aims:

"To describe:

1) If a technology-based communication solution could be implemented across multiple organizations;

and

2) Which factors are associated with clinicians’ intentions to use the technology."

To determine if Pulsara can improve management timelines for patients suspected of having a stroke or cardiac event, researchers  in Australia have conducted a pilot study with a 6 month pre-post historical control design. 

The researchers give the following background to the study:

• "Rapid treatment of patients with suspected acute stroke or cardiac events involves pre-hospital (paramedics) and hospital clinicians from multiple departments including: emergency, medical, neurology or cardiology, radiology or catheterisation."
• "Clinicians repeat patient details using multiple communication methods (phone, fax, pager, face-to-face) and record details in various systems."
• "Inefficient communication may contribute to treatment delays for these time-critical conditions."

To see if Pulsara could help stop the inefficient communication the teams were experiencing -- and thereby reduce associated treatment delays -- the researchers had prehospital clinicians as well as hospital users activate Pulsara for suspected stroke and STEMI cases.

Pulsara was featured last week in a news article on Australian news site, The Courier after Ballarat Base Hospital, Pulsara's second international hospital client, began a pilot of the platform. Ballarat will leverage Pulsara to receive real-time information about a patient’s condition from local paramedics to get the entire emergency department, cardiac, neurology and other specialists and departments on the same page.

Why do we do what we do?

At Pulsara, our "WHY" is to empower TEAMS of caregivers to come together and achieve the best possible outcomes for critical patients as quickly as possible, and with reduced miscommunications and errors.

As clinicians, our "WHY" is to make a difference in the lives of all the patients and their families we touch.

For Pulsara staff and clinicians alike, our "WHY" is also to influence change where change is gravely needed. To move the needle and find new, better ways of treating patients.

One team has truly embraced this mission. The health system in Victoria, Australia, including the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, recently revealed an incredible telemedicine success story: