Revolutionizing Stroke Care One Call at a Time
Did you know there is a national shortage of neurologists who specialize in the emergency treatment of strokes particularly in rural regions? Working to prevent this shortage from affecting our patients, Centra has partnered with Sevaro to provide innovative telemedicine services specifically designed to provide excellent stroke care at each of our emergency rooms and within all inpatient spaces. The technology uses precise cameras to allow a neurologist in another location to complete a full neurological assessment of the patient, even zooming in to see the constriction of their pupils.
Sevaro helps healthcare systems to eliminate gaps in coverage by providing a U.S.-based neurologists that is vascular or neuro-critical care trained on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Other telemedicine services for stroke care often create gaps in care because the phone number is for a call center that subsequently connects the hospital to a neurologist rather than connecting the hospital directly to the physician.
This can cause delays in care and cause care teams to have to wait 15 to 20 minutes before the neurologist can provide a consultation for the patient. With Sevaro, this gap is eliminated, because the hospital has a OneCall™. This gives Centra providers and nurses the ability to directly dial the neurologist on call with one centralized number.
All calls are guaranteed to be answered within 45 seconds, and last year the average time that it took for a call to be answered was only 18 seconds. This is a huge breakthrough for stroke care because time is of the essence when someone is experiencing a stroke. Many often forget that experiencing a stroke is a neurological emergency and that an average of two million brain cells die per minute during the event.
While there are approximately 5,000 hospitals in the United States that could be using this innovative, swift model of care, only 120 hospitals currently utilize Sevaro. Centra serves multiple rural areas, and being able to provide this innovative technology means that even patients in rural settings will be treated by neurologists who have worked at or run programs at the leading stroke care institutions in the United States.