Stroke Treatment Compliance Increased through Improvement Program

By Richard Shank

Research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association demonstrates that hospitals who participated in a voluntary quality improvement program for stroke treatment significantly increased treatment compliance.

Stroke is the third-leading cause of death and a leading cause of long-term disability. Nearly 700,000 strokes occur every year in the U.S. and many of these result in medical complications that occur during the inpatient phase of care. Unfortunately, a large percentage of stroke victims do not receive readily available interventions that are known to reduce long-term function disabilities.

As part of a broader effort to improve stroke care by a number of national health care organizations, The Get with the Guidelines (GWTG) stroke care program was developed. It is designed as a national stroke quality improvement program that will close the gap between the availability of low cost post-stroke interventions and their lack of use.

From April 2003 to April 2004 hospitals were selected from eight different states to participate in the pilot implementation phase of this program. In May 2004, this program was made available to all U.S. hospitals. Since that time, more and more hospitals have continued to join this program.

Trained personnel collected data on consecutive patients admitted to the hospital because of a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA). Patients meeting study criteria were approached about participating in the study. 322,847 clinically-identified patients with diagnoses of ischemic stroke or TIA were enrolled from 790 participating hospitals.

The research found that the longer hospitals remained in the program, the higher the quality of care became; in addition more positive health outcomes for patients were observed. This was especially true of large hospitals with greater bed capacity and teaching hospitals. In short, hospitals who routinely followed the national guidelines for treating stroke victims vastly improved the impact of inpatient care within their facility.

Source: Schwamm, L., Fonarow, G., Reeves, M., et al. 2008. Get with the guidelines-Stroke is associated with sustained improvement in care for patients hospitalized with acute stroke or Transient Ischemic Attack. Circulation 6(13): 107-115.

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