Pulsara Blog

After streamlining communication for their stroke teams with Pulsara, Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, WA reduced door-to-needle times for tPA patients by 31%.

Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, is a 349-bed hospital serving the Puget Sound region since 1953. The hospital treats more than 245,000 outpatients and 18,000 inpatients each year, and is a Joint Commission-certified Advanced Stroke Center. 

As a thrombectomy-capable facility with a large staff of specialists, nurses, and more, Overlake Medical Center sees ~900 acute stroke cases per year. With this volume, providing time-sensitive care is of the utmost importance to producing positive patient outcomes. Overlake knew they needed a streamlined means of communication to help make existing stroke workflows more efficient. 

“With so many people in the system, unnecessary team members were being alerted for a stroke case, which added extraneous noise as they cared for patients,” said Overlake Medical Center’s Stroke Team leaders .

It has been a challenging year in healthcare. The second year of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought burnout, staffing shortages, and the continued struggles associated with trying to care for patients during a pandemic. 

In the midst of it all, many healthcare systems have risen to the challenge and devoted themselves to providing better, faster, and more efficient care for their patients. They've achieved amazing things in 2021, and, in spite of the setbacks and challenges, have found ways to continue to deliver top-notch care for their patients.

Join us as we take a walk through Pulsara's 2021 case studies, celebrate the stories of some of our partner organizations, and highlight the amazing results they've achieved this year!

Large Vessel Occlusion (LVO) strokes are considered to be one of the most severe types of strokes. As with all other stroke types, rapid treatment is key. Mechanical thrombectomy is now the accepted standard of care for treating LVO, meaning that it's critical to take the patient to an interventional-capable facility as quickly as possible—even if that means taking them somewhere further away than the closest available hospital. Time is of the essence; are you up to speed on what to look for when assessing for LVO? 

It’s an oft-quoted fact that for patients suffering from a stroke, 1.9 million neurons are lost every minute their condition goes untreated. Every minute makes a difference—not just between life and death, but in the patient's quality of life once they survive. Will they be able to walk downstairs? Feed themselves? Communicate with their loved ones?

There are many factors that determine how quickly it's possible for a patient to receive treatment. However, there is one consistent obstacle in the way of getting patients timely treatment: the time it takes providers to communicate vital information to everyone on the team. 

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

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On February 19th, 2021, the European Stroke Organisation (ESO) published a new guideline on Intravenous Thrombolysis for acute ischaemic stroke. 

The new guideline comes from a study aimed at providing evidence-based recommendations to help physicians make clinical decisions regarding intravenous thrombolysis for acute ischaemic stroke. Published in the European Stroke Journal, the new guideline is the first in a series of around 10 that are expected to be published in 2021. 

The new guideline makes forty specific recommendations for stroke treatment. The authors of the study outlined the 8 they consider the most important, which are quoted as follows: 

What do EMS and hospital care teams have in common with NASCAR drivers?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. The success or failure of both hinges on one thing: time. 

It might surprise even dedicated fans to learn that all of the cars on the track are limited to the same top speed and horsepower range. With this being the case, how can it be that there is such a large disparity between first and last place?

The answer: The race is won and lost during the pit stop.

Picture this:

About 12 hours into your 24-hour shift, you and your partner are finally sitting down to your first real meal of the day.

Just as the first bite of warm food hits your lips, the tones drop—an all-too-familiar scenario in the world of first responders. 

You’re dispatched to a 51-year-old male reporting chest pain. You walk in the door to a very distraught family, gathered around a man clutching his chest. He is pale and sweating profusely. You meet your partner’s eyes, and you know you’re both thinking the same thing. You quickly obtain the ECG and your suspicions are confirmed: tombstones in leads II, III, and AVF.

In time-sensitive emergencies, time is tissue. Every minute makes the difference in your patient's outcome, for better or worse. 

That's why UCHealth and AMR - Colorado Springs / El Paso County partnered with Pulsara, a healthcare communication and telehealth platform, to save time when patient outcomes are on the line. Pulsara creates a secure, unified patient channel—replaces multiple phone calls, radio reports, faxes, and pagers—and allows care teams to communicate efficiently and effectively when treating patients.

In this live-action retelling of a true story, watch how AMR and UCHealth use Pulsara to streamline and speed their communication processes throughout the patient's journey, making sure that every member of the care team is in the know, when they need to know—from dispatch answering the 911 call, to the hospital staff closing the case after the patient’s treatment is complete.

Over the past five years, Brunei's number of stroke cases have increased by 57%, making stroke the country's fourth-highest cause of death—and the main cause of disabilities. Now, a study conducted over the past two years found that the average age of stroke patients in Brunei is decreasing.

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. 

A new study shows that every 15-minute decrease in door-to-needle time is linked to lower all-cause mortality. How can we work to reduce door-to-needle times?

When a neurologist utters the phrase "time is brain," the implication is that every minute counts in treating each stroke patient. A recent study is further confirming what stroke teams have known since 1993: efficient treatment is everything to better outcomes in stroke care. 

JACKSON, Miss., Sept. 30, 2020 — Healthcare entities across the state have experienced declines in patient numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many patients delaying or avoiding life-saving treatment for serious conditions such as stroke or heart attack over fears of the virus.

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.

New York Hospital Improves Communication and Door-to-Needle Times with Pulsara

Just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, care teams at Mount St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, New York realized that they needed a better way to communicate. According to an article published recently in a local Lewiston news source, Mount St. Mary’s chose to adopt Pulsara in order to open better lines of communication between EMS and emergency department staff.

Pulsara is a mobile-first telehealth and communication platform that connects teams across organizations. Through the use of mobile technology, Pulsara allows every member of the care team —from medics to nurses to physicians — to communicate on one dedicated channel for each patient. And for stroke patients at Mount St. Mary’s Regional Stroke Center, more efficient care team communication can have a major impact.

By replacing pagers and phone calls with mobile-first technology across the entire patient care team, a hospital achieves better patient outcomes and care team collaboration.

Since COVID-19 began spreading in the United States in March, emergency departments have seen a sharp decrease in the number of STEMI and stroke patients coming through their doors. For almost two months, polls and anecdotal evidence have suggested that this is happening all over the country, as well as in countries like Spain, the UK, and China. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology decided to conduct a formal study of nine major hospitals across the U.S. On April 7th, they released the results, confirming with statistical evidence what doctors have been experiencing: on average, the nine hospitals saw a 38% reduction in cath lab activations for STEMI patients.

Overlake Medical Center is a Certified Joint Commission Thrombectomy-Capable Stroke Center in the Seattle, WA area. Recently, they posted an article detailing an inspiring stroke survival story. The article also discusses the Overlake's recent efforts to improve treatment times for stroke patients: 

"Overlake’s stroke program has received numerous awards over the years, reflecting its commitment to providing patients the latest technologies and innovative treatments. Staying true to that commitment, the hospital recently implemented use of a smartphone app called Pulsara that mobilizes the stroke care team with a single tap.