Cleveland Clinic http://clevelandclinic.org researchers presenting preliminary data at the American Stroke Association’s, International Stroke Conference 2015, reported that mobile stroke treatment units are more effective than the traditional ambulance transport for timely treatment of stroke. Time is very important when treating both hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke, as victims lose about 2 million neurons per minute.
Mobile units are more than a standard ambulance as they contain all of the equipment and medical personnel necessary for treating stroke patients. This includes housing the CT scanner required to determine treatment for hemorrhagic versus ischemic stroke plus telemedicine technology to enable video conferencing between the mobile unit crew and the in-hospital stroke specialist.
For this study, 23 patients were treated in the mobile stroke unit group and 34 in the control group. A patient registry was created for three weeks following the launch of the mobile stroke treatment units in July 2014. The data was compared to the control group of patients brought to the emergency department by traditional ambulance for the preceding three months.
Patients treated on the mobile unit experienced about a 40 minute reduction in the treatment time when compared with the standard model of ambulance transport and in-hospital evaluation and treatment as compared to patients transported by the mobile unit versus 104 minutes in emergency room patients.
In addition to the reduction of time-to-treatment, research shoes a reduction of time in CT scan completion, by 21 minutes. More significantly, a higher rate (26 percent vs. 14 percent) of treatment using intravenous tPA was achieved.