Jeremy Payne, MD, PhD: The Need to Improve Telestroke Care

“Traditionally, they roll the camera up to the bedside in the emergency department and the ED doc walks off, and the remote doc tries to figure things out with the patient…and that’s it.”

New data from the TELECAST trial suggest that telestroke intervention can improve access to a neurologist, completion of recommended laboratory evaluation, and use of indicated outpatient cardiac monitoring for those with acute stroke. The analysis, which was conducted by Matthew Ronck, MD, vascular neurology fellow, University of Minnesota, et al, was scheduled to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) 2020 Annual Meeting.

The trial’s preliminary results showed that the delivery of acute stroke care with a 24-7 inpatient telestroke service at a spoke hospital which had no prior access to stroke specialists enabled an improvement in guideline-based diagnostic evaluation for patients with acute stroke, which in turn, may lead to better directed secondary stroke prevention with the potential to decrease stroke recurrence.

To find out more about how the data from this abstract might be interpreted in the clinical community, NeurologyLive spoke with Jeremy Payne, MD, PhD, director, Stroke Center, Banner-University Medicine Neuroscience Institute, who was unaffiliated with the study. Payne detailed how these data fit in with the existing literature, the current use of telestroke, as well as what still needs to be improved with regard to its use.

For more AAN 2020 coverage, click here.

REFERENCE

Ronck M, Ngo M, Jaton E, et al. Inpatient Telestroke Coverage Improves Guideline-based Diagnostic Stroke Evaluation: Results from the TELECAST trial. Neurology. 2020;94(15 Suppl): 5332.