Deans' stroke musings: Quality Improvement in Acute Ischemic Stroke Care in Taiwan: The Breakthrough Collaborative in Stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Quality Improvement in Acute Ischemic Stroke Care in Taiwan: The Breakthrough Collaborative in Stroke

What a waste. Get With the Guidelines is worthless because they are not measuring and focusing on results. You could have 100% guidelines followed and all the patients died and still meet the guidelines. This is a breakthrough in stupidity. If you really want a stretch goal you do door to needle time in negative time, i.e. prior to even entering the hospital door. That would be a result worth shooting for.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0160426

Published: August 3, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160426

Abstract

In the management of acute ischemic stroke, guideline adherence is often suboptimal, particularly for intravenous thrombolysis or anticoagulation for atrial fibrillation. We sought to improve stroke care quality via a collaborative model, the Breakthrough Series (BTS)-Stroke activity, in a nationwide, multi-center activity in Taiwan. A BTS Collaborative, a short-term learning system for a large number of multidisciplinary teams from hospitals, was applied to enhance acute ischemic stroke care quality. Twenty-four hospitals participated in and submitted data for this stroke quality improvement campaign in 2010–2011. Totally, 14 stroke quality measures, adopted from the Get With The Guideline (GWTG)-Stroke program, were used to evaluate the performance and outcome of the ischemic stroke patients. Data for a one-year period from 24 hospitals with 13,181 acute ischemic stroke patients were analyzed. In 14 hospitals, most stroke quality measures improved significantly during the BTS-activity compared with a pre-BTS-Stroke activity period (2006–08). The rate of intravenous thrombolysis increased from 1.2% to 4.6%, door-to-needle time ≤60 minutes improved from 7.1% to 50.8%, symptomatic hemorrhage after intravenous thrombolysis decreased from 11.0% to 5.6%, and anticoagulation therapy for atrial fibrillation increased from 32.1% to 64.1%. The yearly composite measures of five stroke quality measures revealed significant improvements from 2006 to 2011 (75% to 86.3%, p<0.001). The quarterly composite measures also improved significantly during the BTS-Stroke activity. In conclusion, a BTS collaborative model is associated with improved guideline adherence for patients with acute ischemic stroke. GWTG-Stroke recommendations can be successfully applied in countries besides the United States.