Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The burden of stroke is significant. One in four Canadians will suffer a stroke by the time they reach 80. For strokes with a blocked artery, therapeutically unblocking the artery fast will significantly improve outcomes. If we can open the artery (reperfusion) within 3 hours of symptom onset, lives can be saved and more patients can walk away from the hospital without the need for extensive rehabilitation. Specifically, treatments include administration of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) intravenously and/or endovascular treatment, a minimally invasive surgery to remove the clot. However, the effectiveness of these therapies are time dependent, and efficiencies need to be achieved by improving stroke service. In order to make these improvements, healthcare professionals need to understand their performance. Interactive visualization can allow for discovery, monitoring and exploration of performance for better collaborative decision-making, which has the potential to dramatically improve healthcare systems. We will undertake the following steps to ensure that stroke patients receive fast treatment: collect stroke data, visualize data, recognize patterns in the visualization to identify solutions to delays, implement solutions, and observe improved stroke care. Visualizations of stroke data will be designed to ensure the greatest understanding of the data by health professionals to recognize the causes of delays. Together with health and medical professionals at the hospitals in Alberta, we will then implement the changes to address the delays. We will study the extent of improvement over time and if there was any significant improvement in mortality and disability