A friend asked me what is the best stroke hospital to go to locally.

The answer quite simply is; There is no way of knowing. Hospitals do not put out any useful statistics on their 30-day death rate, their tPA efficacy, how many patients fully recover. Because they don't do that they obfuscate by saying they meet Joint Commission standards, or Get With the Guideline standards, or CARF guidelines. These are all completely worthless because you really don't care how well they are following processes, you want to know RESULTS.
So until this mindset on stroke hospitals change you are f*cking screwed. So to get around this failure, call your local stroke hospital president and ask when they will publish results and fire the incompetent stroke department heads that allowed this failure to occur.

Nothing will change unless the 10 million survivors a year start screaming that their stroke hospitals and doctors are failing them. You need to pay it forward by vociferously complaining about these failures.