Virtual Stroke Evaluation Effective But Time Consuming

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

While the use of telemedicine to evaluate stroke victims takes longer than using an on-site doctor, it can still be effective when there is no vascular neurologist on-site.

Health IT Outcomes reported the American Stroke Association recommends administration of intravenous thrombolytic treatment within 60 minutes of the patient’s arrival at the emergency department. But, what if the emergency department isn’t equipped with a full time neurologist? The answer may be telemedicine.

Telemedicine and e-Health published research which sought to discover if telemedicine was effective for stroke evaluations. Researchers analyzed telemedicine stroke evaluations for 98 patients and compared them to 98 evaluations from in house neurologists at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix.

According to Fierce Health IT, among the findings was, “The mean duration of time from stroke alert activation to initiation of intravenous thrombolytic treatment or downgrade was 8.6 minutes longer in the robotic group than in the standard group.” The authors did note that, although the robotic group took longer, the evaluations were preferable in situations where no stroke specialist is available in-house.

“In conclusion, a standard stroke supervisory assessment is preferable to robotic telepresence stroke supervisory assessment in situations where it is possible to use either method,” wrote researchers. “Outcomes from robotic telepresence acute stroke supervisory assessments were good and approached the gold standard. Robotic telepresence may be preferable in situations where no stroke specialist is available in-house, especially for middle of the night and weekend staffing of residents, when a 9-min robot-associated delay is likely better than the delay associated with the supervising physician driving in to the hospital.”