The ROI of mobile stroke units

These people pushing this are f*cking idiots if they don't see that these mobile stroke units will soon become obsolete. The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize will make this totally obsolete. And with tPA having a 88% failure rate, it seems doubly stupid to go down this route. Does absolutely no one read any current news on stroke at all? This may be the best they can do for now but it seems they are determined to have a failed short term project. I really don't care how famous these hospitals are, they still are stupid.
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/roi-mobile-stroke-units
In stroke care, swift treatment is key to preventing death and disability, and health systems looking to get ahead on incentives for population health might consider new investing .
The Cleveland Clinic and University of Texas Health are using the nation’s first mobile stroke units to treat stroke patients sooner, and both show promise in preserving patients’ quality of life and saving a great deal of money for the U.S. healthcare system.
Currently, when someone experiencing stroke symptoms makes a 911 call, they are not fully evaluated until they enter the hospital, and if they’re suffering an ischemic stroke, it takes on average 62 minutes for them to receive the clot-busting, brain-saving tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) therapy, said Stephanie Parker, RN, project manager of UTHealth’s Mobile Stroke Unit in Houston.
In other words, that’s a loss of around one hundred and twenty million neurons, since two million die every minute during a stroke.
[See also: Mobile health vans' value proposition.]
In contrast, mobile stroke units can be dispatched to the scene and literally bring the ER to the patient’s driveway. Inside a unit, a portable CT scanner images the patient’s brain, providing immediate results for determination of whether the patient should be treated with tPA.
“We can bring a highly trained team of individuals with no other distractions directly to the scene,” said Peter Rasmussen, MD, director of Cleveland Clinic’s Cerebrovascular Center. And via telemedicine, "[the stroke unit] can bring a world caliber expert, a clinical neurologist, to the home, versus a patient going to the local hospital,” he added.
“The mobile stroke unit provides faster time-to-treatment and also reduces costs,” Rasmussen said. “Most of the cost is in the cost of caring, in rehabilitation. The best way to reduce the cost is to introduce treatment as quickly as possible.”
According to Rasmussen and Parker, mobile stroke units may be able to reduce the need and costs for acute care and improve outcomes to the extent that rehabilitation services become unnecessary or are significantly lessened.
If the Cleveland Clinic and UTHealth show that’s possible, mobile stroke units have the potential to save billions of dollars if they are incorporated into ambulance fleets throughout the country. And Rasmussen indicated that there is interest from many academic and non-academic healthcare centers throughout the United States.
Currently, the mobile stroke unit is undergoing a two-year study at UTHealth, the home of the nation’s first unit. The study aims to ascertain if administering tPA faster improves patient outcomes, and then measure cost effectiveness, Parker said.