Editor's Note: The following excerpt originally appeared on the Healthcare Informatics website on March 7, 2017, and the article can be read in its entirety here. Pulsara is humbled by the incredible care teams in Colorado Springs who are tirelessly working and innovating to provide the best possible care for their community. A vision without action is worth very little. It is the hard work and dedication of these teams that is truly making the difference in acute care and in the lives of patients.

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Hospital physicians and nurses know all too well that time can make a difference when treating patients suffering from a heart attack or stroke. Unfortunately, gaps in communication between emergency responders and hospital staff is a persistent and common problem and can slow down the process of getting accurate, pertinent patient information from the field, such as the emergency medical technicians and paramedics on the scene, to the hospital staff.

To tackle these challenges, hospitals from two different health systems have partnered with each other and with a dozen local emergency medical services (EMS) agencies to use mobile technology to coordinate their care teams to accelerate time to treatment for critical care patients and to provide better care for stroke and heart attack patients.

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:

This past week at the International Stroke Conference in Houston, Mission: Lifeline Stroke released two documents related to prehospital LVO care.

... No, it's not chocolates and flowers.

The medical research community is continually providing us with exciting new technology and clinical findings that can make our jobs in EMS easier and our treatments more precise. So why are we not always sharing these findings with our patients? Well I’m here to tell you, those 80’s parachute pants were great 35 years ago but it’s time to buy some new britches.

New study examines how Pulsara, an app used by paramedics, emergency rooms and stroke teams, can reduce the time it takes for a hospital to deliver clot-busting drugs to stroke patients.

Currently in the United States, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds, and each of those cases relies on getting treatment as fast as possible in order to assure best chances for recovery. Expediting care for these critical patients requires smooth communication between first responders in the field, the emergency room staff, and the specialty stroke team. Unfortunately, this delicate relay is not always well executed, as care teams are patching together archaic technologies such as pagers, faxes, emails, call lists, and other communication methods that do not integrate.

We’ve known for a while now that when EMS providers are properly trained, they perform at a high level when it comes to treating and assessing patients. For example, past studies have shown that paramedics who had formal training in identifying STEMI on a 12-lead ECG could do so with the same level of proficiency as most ED Physicians (1). The same goes for identifying stroke. A similar study showed that paramedics were on par with ED physicians when it comes to identifying stroke using simple stroke scales such as the CPSS or FAST (2). 

1.9 million neurons, 14 billion synapses, and 7.5 miles of myelinated fibers — this is what a brain experiencing an acute stroke loses every MINUTE that passes without treatment. Even more compelling, the brain ages 3.6 YEARS with every hour that a stroke goes untreated. It doesn’t require a medical degree to understand why reducing the treatment times of stroke patients is a vital priority for the healthcare community.

When the concept for EMS was born nearly 50 years ago, it was meant to be an integrated part of a smooth system of care beginning with the call to EMS dispatch and continuing through to definitive treatment. However, EMS-to-hospital communications have faced significant barriers including miscommunications due to archaic and unreliable technologies, issues transmitting ECGs and other patient data, inadequate training in STEMI recognition, and lack of access to patient outcome information for EMS. According to an article published in JEMS this week, recent studies have shown that prehospital notification by EMS improves time to treatment for stroke, however these notifications are not part of a consistent and standardized protocol, and in 25% of cases, EMS fails to alert the hospital of an incoming stroke patient.