Pulsara Blog | Stroke

3 min read

Mobilize Your Care Teams Early to Maximize Peak Performance

By Brittany Means, RN, BSN on Jan 22, 2021

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.

Topics: Stroke STEMI EMS Coordinators' Corner

3 min read

Pulsara in Action: Following A Patient's Journey with AMR and UCHealth

By Nathan Williams on Jan 04, 2021

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.

Topics: Stroke EMS Client Rockstars Technology Customer Success Patient

2 min read

New Research Shows Average Age of Brunei Stroke Patients Decreasing

By Kinsie Clarkson on Dec 07, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Time Sensitive Emergencies

2 min read

Video Interview: Australia’s Latrobe Regional Hospital & Ambulance Victoria

By Kinsie Clarkson on Nov 04, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Press Communication Telemedicine Connected Teams COVID-19 Telehealth Customer Success Australia

7 min read

Study: Lower Door-to-Needle Times Linked to Lower All-Cause Mortality

By Kinsie Clarkson on Oct 30, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Communication Time Sensitive Emergencies Connected Teams

3 min read

PRESS RELEASE: St. Dominic’s Among First to Integrate Two Stroke Technologies for Faster Treatment

By Team Pulsara on Sep 30, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Press Customer Success

2 min read

Australia’s Latrobe Regional Hospital Improves Door-to-CT Times by 68% with Pulsara (Case Study)

By Kinsie Clarkson on Sep 28, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Press Communication Connected Teams COVID-19 Telehealth Customer Success Australia

2 min read

Better Stroke Care for NY Mount St. Mary's Hospital

By Team Pulsara on Aug 14, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Communication Telemedicine Technology Connected Teams Interoperability Customer Success

3 min read

PRESS RELEASE: CHRISTUS Good Shepherd Medical Center - Longview Achieves 59% Decrease in Door-to-Needle Time with Innovative Telemedicine Platform, Pulsara

By Team Pulsara on May 27, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Press Connected Teams

7 min read

Where Are the STEMIs and Strokes? Doctors Urge Patients Not to Wait

By Kinsie Clarkson on May 08, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke STEMI COVID-19

1 min read

Overlake Medical Center Reduces Time to Thrombectomy by 39 Minutes

By Hannah Ostrem on Jan 17, 2020

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.

Topics: Stroke Connected Teams

3 min read

How to Reclaim Your Clinical Dead Space

By Greg Brown on Jan 13, 2020

The biggest pain point I encountered when working nights in the ED was communication — mainly, waiting. Call lists, pagers, and phone trees were our reality when we needed to act fast. But think about it: do we communicate this way in any other aspects of our lives? Why can I order a ride to the airport from a complete stranger with a few taps on my smartphone, but I need to use a pager to connect with providers I know personally? In medicine, when time is of the utmost importance, we still communicate like it’s 1985.

Topics: Stroke Systems of Care

1 min read

Technology and Data are Key to Transforming Stroke Care [TED Talk]

By Hannah Ostrem on Jan 03, 2020

Dr. Brijesh Mehta is a Neurointerventional Surgeon, currently practicing at Memorial Neuroscience Center in Hollywood, FL. He recently gave a TED talk describing how his teams have leveraged new research, technology, and data to improve stroke care and give patients better outcomes.

In the talk, Dr. Mehta describes how large vessel occlusion stroke (LVO) is "like a wildfire in the brain." He also says there used to be little we could do to stop the devastating effects, but now, thanks to new technologies and procedures such as thrombectomy, patients are regaining functionality and leaving the hospital much sooner than they had in the past.

Topics: Stroke EMS Systems of Care

6 min read

STEMI, Stroke, Sepsis and ROSC: A Decade for EMS Systems of Care

By Mic Gunderson on Dec 20, 2019

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article was first published on EMS1.com. Special thanks to guest author, Mic Gunderson*

In the coming decade, EMS will be engaged in even more efforts to triage patients in the field to route them to the most appropriate hospitals.

Systems of care is a term that commonly refers to healthcare delivery that involves multiple organizations. EMS is deeply involved in systems of care for time-sensitive conditions like major trauma, STEMI, and cardiac arrest. Formal integration of EMS into those systems of care started in the 1960s and 70s – and the success of those early systems initiatives has continued to reverberate into this decade.

Topics: Stroke STEMI EMS Sepsis Systems of Care

1 min read

A Pulsara Stroke Case Demo

By Hannah Ostrem on Dec 02, 2019

When our care teams are all on the same page, communication is seamless, and treatment times are reduced, ultimately improving quality of care. How you can leverage the Pulsara communication platform to connect your care teams—whether in your organization or dispersed across many organizations?

Topics: Stroke Communication Systems of Care

2 min read

Not All Strokes Are Created Equal: LVO Recognition and Transport Decisions for Prehospital Providers

By Team Pulsara on Nov 22, 2019

Prehospital stroke care continues to evolve. Over the past five years, mechanical thrombectomy has emerged as the preferred treatment option for patients presenting with large vessel occlusion strokes. EMS agencies are now being challenged to recognize large vessel occlusions on-scene and consider direct transport to comprehensive stroke centers for mechanical thrombectomy.

Topics: Stroke EMS

1 min read

Miami Valley Hospital Featured on News for Pulsara and RAPID Integration

By Hannah Ostrem on Nov 08, 2019

Miami Valley Hospital, part of Premier Health, was recently featured on the news for their implementation of both the RAPID stroke imaging platform and Pulsara's communication platform.

"When patients come in to the hospital after having a stroke, there's a lot of information that needs to get collected, and a lot of people are part of the team that collects that information," said Dr. John Terry, Director of Inpatient Stroke Care at Premier Health. "Pulsara allows all those people to be able to communicate and know what everyone else is doing at the same time." Dr. Terry says that that transparency and ease of communication has changed the hospital's stroke treatment protocols in a "very beneficial way."

Topics: Stroke Connected Teams Interoperability

7 min read

Building a Regional System of LVO Stroke Care

By MCHD on Nov 04, 2019

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to our guest bloggers, Casey B. Patrick, MD, FACEP, and Robert L. Dickson, MD, FAAEM, FACEP, FACEM of Montgomery County Hospital District EMS.

--
There are more than 700,000 strokes in the U.S. every year, and stroke is the number one cause of disability in our country. It’s estimated that up to one third of ischemic strokes are large-vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes.¹ These occur in the large blood vessels that supply the brain, specifically the internal carotid, middle cerebral, and basilar arteries. Given the large portions of the brain supplied with blood by these arteries, these types of ischemic strokes cause significant morbidity and mortality.

Topics: Stroke

4 min read

How Virginia Mason Medical Center Broke Down Healthcare Communication Silos

By Team Pulsara on Oct 01, 2019

Editor's Note: The following article originally appeared on Becker's Healthcare Review, and was authored by Anuja Vaidya (Twitter).

One of the biggest contributors to inefficiency in healthcare is a lack of communication, which can lead to lower quality of care and higher costs. Communication in healthcare is siloed for many reasons, including the complexity of the work, the size of health systems, outdated and non-integrated communication technologies, and HIPAA constraints.

"We do really well inside of each team [in terms of communication] … but when we try to cross those disciplines, or actually go between facilities, we start to see a breakdown or dissolution in the quality of information," said Forrest Winslow, clinical specialist at health IT company Pulsara.

Topics: Stroke

5 min read

Miami Valley Hospital First in World to Integrate Two Stroke Technologies

By Team Pulsara on Sep 27, 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Combination of Pulsara and RAPID expands window of opportunity for treatment

BOZEMAN, MT – September 27, 2019 – Miami Valley Hospital is the first site in the world to use the combination of a specific software application and mobile platform to enhance the treatment used to preserve a patient’s neurological function after a stroke.

While many hospitals use both applications – Pulsara and RAPID – in their stroke care, none have taken the step to combine their capabilities into one, said John Terry, MD, director of inpatient stroke care at Miami Valley Hospital.

Pulsara, a mobile platform, was developed by physicians to improve coordination and communication essential for stroke patient assessment. RAPID is a global leader in advanced imaging.

3 min read

Topics: Stroke STEMI EMS Coordinators' Corner

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Topics: Stroke EMS Client Rockstars Technology Customer Success Patient

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Topics: Stroke Time Sensitive Emergencies

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Topics: Stroke Press Communication Telemedicine Connected Teams COVID-19 Telehealth Customer Success Australia

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Topics: Stroke Communication Time Sensitive Emergencies Connected Teams

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Topics: Stroke Press Customer Success

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Topics: Stroke Press Communication Connected Teams COVID-19 Telehealth Customer Success Australia

2 min read

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

Topics: Stroke Communication Telemedicine Technology Connected Teams Interoperability Customer Success

3 min read

Topics: Stroke Press Connected Teams

7 min read

Topics: Stroke STEMI COVID-19

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Topics: Stroke Connected Teams

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Topics: Stroke Systems of Care

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Topics: Stroke EMS Systems of Care

6 min read

In the coming decade, EMS will be engaged in even more efforts to triage patients in the field to route them to the most appropriate hospitals.

Topics: Stroke STEMI EMS Sepsis Systems of Care

1 min read

Topics: Stroke Communication Systems of Care

2 min read

Topics: Stroke EMS

1 min read

Topics: Stroke Connected Teams Interoperability

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Topics: Stroke

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Topics: Stroke

5 min read

Topics: Stroke Press Patient Safety Regional Systems of Care Connected Teams

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