QI Program Leads to Better Stroke Outcomes

This is the Get With the Guidelines program.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/AdditionalMeetings/39186?
Hospitals participating in a national quality improvement program provided better outcomes for patients with acute ischemic stroke, researchers found.
Centers that participated in the Get With The Guidelines-Stroke program had significantly higher rates of patients getting discharged to home and lower rates of mortality at 30 days and 1 year, when compared with similar hospitals that did not join the program, according to Sarah Song, MD, MPH, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Those advantages were seen both shortly after joining the program and up to 540 days after participation began, Song reported at the American Heart Association's Quality of Care and Outcomes Research meeting in Baltimore.
The study suggests that even for hospitals that are primary stroke centers and are meeting all the quality metrics established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), "this program might have an additional benefit," Song said in an interview. "This could be a really big impetus to join the program, and I think it should be."
Committing to the guidelines is a reflection of a commitment to being prepared to handle acute stroke cases, according to Patrick Lyden, MD, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which participates in the program.
"I think the data [are] extremely informative to the public," said Lyden, who was not involved in the study. "You want to go to a stroke center that has some form of preparedness and the easiest way to be prepared is to comply with Get With The Guidelines."
Although previous studies have shown that participation in Get With The Guidelines-Stroke is associated with improvement in various processes of care, an attempt had not been made to compare patient outcomes in an analysis matching participating hospitals with similar non-participating centers, Song said.

More at link.
This from a commenter is interesting.
These are marginal effects and require hospitals to invoke herculean efforts to attain them. It requires stroke coordinators, daily monitoring of quality measures, numerous meetings and intra- departmental collaborations to actually see the results. While it is likely cost-effective, you would think the major payor in stroke treatment (a la CMS) would develop, encourage and implement some standardized treatment algorithms to improve the country's performance on this treatable and preventable disease.


This just points out how badly needed stopping the neuronal cascade of death is.