Pulsara Blog

Editor's Note: This post is adapted from a report first published by the Victorian Agency for Health Information, a division of Australia's Department of Health. Check out the original version here. 

A recent report published by a division of Australia's Department of Health, the Victorian Agency for Health Information, confirmed the benefit of using communication and logistics technology for patient care at Latrobe Regional Hospital in Traralgon, Victoria. New data from the Australian Stroke Clinical Registry showed as much as an 80% reduction in time-to-treatment for critical stroke patients.

Latrobe Regional Hospital is a busy regional health service in the eastern Victorian town of Traralgon, with 328 beds and 2,465 staff servicing a catchment of more than 270,000 people. The emergency department alone sees 42,000 people each year.

At the recent National Stroke Quality Improvement Workshop, Latrobe Regional Hospital shared how they used registry data to evaluate newly implemented technology designed to streamline day-to-day operations and facilitate better treatment times. The Australian Stroke Clinical Registry data played a key role in evaluating the use of Pulsara at Latrobe Regional Hospital, responding to staff questions about how the health service would measure the performance and impact of the new technology.

Australian-based healthcare real-world feasibility study finds improved communication and faster patient care timelines when using Pulsara.

Bozeman, Mont., September 1, 2022 — Pulsara, the leading mobile telehealth, communication, and logistics platform that unites healthcare teams and technologies across organizations during dynamic events, announced the publication of the British Medical Journal real-world feasibility study analyzing the effects of Pulsara on care team communication and acute stroke and STEMI patient treatment times. Titled “Real-world, feasibility study to investigate the use of a multidisciplinary app (Pulsara) to improve prehospital communication and timelines for acute stroke/STEMI care,” the study was conducted in Victoria, Australia with pre-hospital and within-hospital clinical teams. As a first-of-its-kind systematic analysis of Pulsara’s efficacy across the whole patient journey for treatment of stroke and STEMI, the study found that utilization of the platform resulted in significant patient treatment time improvements. 

“Implementation of the Pulsara digital communication application resulted in faster metrics of the patient arriving at hospital and being at triage when Pulsara was used, as well as patient off ambulance stretcher times for both stroke and STEMI cases,” reported study authors Chris F. Bladin et al. “Hospital metrics for stroke cases also improved significantly with door-to-first medical review and door-to-CT completed more rapidly.” 

A recent study published in the Medical Journal of Australia shows that longer ambulance offload times are associated with greater 30-day risks of death and ambulance re-attendance for people presenting to the emergency department with chest pain. 

The large population-based study analyzed a sample of patients who arrived at the ED with non-traumatic chest pain. The goal was to assess whether ambulance offload time "influenced the risks of death or ambulance re-attendance with chest pain within 30 days of the initial ED presentation.”

According to the study, increases in offload times have a direct impact on the outcomes of patients experiencing time-sensitive ailments—specifically chest pain symptoms, which may indicate a variety of cardiac issues. As a result, the study's authors recommend that "Improving the speed of ambulance-to-ED transfers is urgently required.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has lengthened response times for ambulance agencies worldwide, making it much more difficult to find placement for patients. A recent report released by Australia’s Ambulance Victoria confirmed that this trend has worsened significantly in the state of Victoria during the last three months of 2021, showing a significant increase in response times across the region.  

The new data from Ambulance Victoria shows that paramedics’ ability to respond to code 1 emergencies within the recommended standard of 15 minutes dropped by 12% over the previous 12 months, going from 79% in October to December of 2020 to 67% during the same period in 2021. This means that around one-third of code 1 emergencies waited more than 15 minutes for responders to arrive. Melbourne’s suburbs have been disproportionately affected by the delays, owing to distance. Towns like Melton and Cardinia averaged around 53%. 

New technology is often an exciting prospect. It's fun to experiment with, especially when it promises to help streamline a cumbersome process. But ultimately, the true test of technology is whether it actually improves the way you do things...and when it comes to technology in healthcare, how it helps you provide better care for your patients.  

So when a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia implemented Pulsara to improve communication between their care teams, they were curious about what the innovative new technology could do for them. But more importantly, they wanted to see what it could do for their patients.

Over the past few years, they have successfully developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time. And, they're happy to report, their new system has helped them provide stellar care for their patients.

Change management is hard. Adopting new technology and new workflows can be an exciting process, but that process may also bring hesitance, skepticism, fear, and doubt. It's not easy to change the way you've always done things. 

So when a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia implemented new technology to improve communication between their care teams, they worked hard to make sure that everyone was on the same page. And it worked. They've seen a great deal of success with their strategies, and have successfully developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time—a system that their teams now love. 

Patient care involves many moving parts, several teams, and a lot of people. How do you get everybody on the same page, especially when messages have to travel through multiple communication methods before they reach their intended recipient? How do you unite all the disparate teams involved in a patient's healthcare journey—from ambulance to emergency department to specialty teams—into one region-wide system of care? 

Over the last few years, a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia have implemented cutting-edge technology to improve communication between their care teams. They've seen a great deal of success with their strategies, and have developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time.  

In this three-part series, you'll hear directly from them on their search for a solution, the results they've seen, and the advice they would offer other systems that want to build their own regional system of care. 

View the full webinar video discussion below, or read on for Part 1 of the full roundtable! (Part 2 and Part 3 can be accessed here.)

Breakdowns and bottlenecks in healthcare communication systems frequently cause a myriad of delays in patient care. Legacy systems like radios, pagers, fax machines, and multiple phone calls connect clinicians but aren't always able to efficiently get the right message to the right person at the right time. Combined with the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's clear that our current systems of communication need to be reimagined. Healthcare officials must begin to think differently. 

Your acute care, collaboration, and coordination solution needs to be scalable and flexible, enabling you to adapt quickly to the dynamic needs of patients and clinicians—and span across all organizations involved in patient care. By replacing legacy systems with one solution that covers the entire care continuum, health providers can achieve reduced treatment times, conserve resources, and improve the lives of both patients and caregivers.

When: The evening of April 27 in the USA; 11 AM on the 28th in New South Wales, Australia

Cost: FREE

Registration: Click here to register

Read on for further details!

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: