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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Hospitals participating in a voluntary quality improvement program for stroke treatment comply better to national recommendations and may provide better stroke treatment.
In a five-year study, researchers tracked guideline compliance among 790 hospitals participating in the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With the Guidelines-Stroke (GWTG-Stroke) program.
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They found among all possible interventions to prevent another stroke or reduce stroke disability, the overall absolute percentage of interventions performed in eligible patients increased from 83.5 percent in year one to 93.7 percent in year five. They also found for every year of participation, hospitals were 18 percent more likely to deliver guideline-based care.
"These results indicate there is a very powerful effect to participating in the program," Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., lead author of the study, was quoted as saying.
The GWTG-Stroke program is a comprehensive program that provides an online interactive assessment and report tool, resources, quarterly workshops, training and feedback to staff at participating hospitals. The goal is to improve implementation of evidence-based interventions that are proven to reduce complications after stroke and the chances of a subsequent stroke or heart attack.
The program itself was shown to increase the absolute percentage of ischemic stroke patients treated with clot-busters within two hours of stroke onset from 42 percent to 72.8 percent, increase the absolute percentage of patients beginning smoking cessation from 65.2 percent to 93.6 percent and increase the absolute percentage of patients being started on cholesterol-lowering drugs from 73.3 percent to 88.3 percent.
SOURCE: Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, published online Dec. 15, 2008
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