Angels Initiative Launches App to Help Reduce Stroke Treatment Time
Karmarama, part of Accenture Interactive, has worked on an app with the Angels Initiative designed to help increase survival rates and reduce the long-term impacts of a stroke. The Angels Initiative is run by Boehringer Ingelheim in partnership with the European Stroke Organisation (ESO), the World Stroke Organisation (WSO), the Stroke Alliance for Europe (SAFE) and many other national stroke societies and companies. The Stroke Stopwatch app is available free of charge to hospitals, to help reduce ‘door-to-treatment’ time – the crucial first 60 minutes from when a stroke patient is admitted to when they receive care.
The Angels Initiative aims to improve care for as many people as possible who have suffered a stroke and thus save lives. It does so by building acute stroke networks, optimising treatment procedures and sharing knowledge to set up specialised stroke-units. Depending on the medical teams’ training, hospitals’ facilities and processes, the time-to-treatment can vary drastically. The Angels Initiative identified that training and tools like the Stroke Stopwatch App can help hospitals initiate treatment for patients quicker after the onset of symptoms, when a patient typically loses two million neurons per minute.
The Stroke Stopwatch app for mobile devices is based on a built-in timer. When activated, it tracks time taken to get the patient to each stage of treatment, giving doctors better information on the patient’s health. Every 15 minutes saved gives the patient a four per cent greater chance of independence at discharge, a four per cent higher chance of survival before discharge and a four per cent lower chance of having a haemorrhagic transformation. The app aims to get treatment time down to below 60 minutes.
Karmarama user experience (UX) experts worked alongside hospital teams to complete phased testing and optimise the efficiency of the app. The app is simplistic and easy-to-use, designed not to interfere with patient care. Users of the app are encouraged to record their data and track progress to achieve and maintain standards, with badges awarded based on performance.
Jan van der Merwe, Angels Initiative project lead, said: “Suffering a stroke is one of the most devastating medical emergencies that can happen to a person. 15 million people worldwide suffer a stroke every year. Time is the most critical aspect for acute stroke care and the Stroke Stopwatch app is helping to improve stroke care by making hospitals conscious of those vital first 60 minutes.”
As well as using the app for analysis of live cases, hospital teams can use it to keep track of historic cases and take case-by-case learnings. Anonymised patient data is then shared with the Registry of Stroke Care Quality (RES-Q), developed under the European Stroke Organisation to help physicians monitor and make long-term improvements to stroke care quality.
The app has already seen results. ‘Door-to-needle’ treatment time was reduced by 30 per cent in hospitals using the app.
Dan Moran, managing partner at Karmarama, said: “While the design is simplistic; the Stroke Stopwatch app has big intentions to answer a complex problem. This is an example of using technology in a traditionally analogue environment to have huge impact on health results.”
