Establishing audio-video contacts between doctors and patients through the internet may have an immediate and profound impact on the treatment of stroke patients throughout the world, say researchers.
Dr. Brett C. Meyer, Co- Director of the UC San Diego Medical Center Stroke Center, describes this approach as telemedicine.
He and his colleagues studied the use of a site-independent telemedicine system while being used to provide remote consultation, leading to treatment decisions about stroke patients.
The researchers say that their main objective was to determine whether such an approach could allow doctors to make good treatment decisions, and better decisions than telephone consultations, when evaluating stroke patients across distant sites.
The results of the STRokE DOC trial, based on 222 patients cases, showed that telemedicine evaluation actually led to better decision-making than telephone consultations in the care of those patients.
A research article in the journal Lancet Neurology says that STRokE DOC connects stroke experts located at a "hub" site to the patient at a remote but connected "spoke" site via the Internet.
The article adds that the audio/video teleconsultation system allows the stroke expert real-time visual and audio access to the patient, medical team and medical data at the remote site.
"We assumed that telemedicine was a good idea, but it hadn't been scientifically tested until now. Using STRokE DOC, our stroke team physicians were able to evaluate the patient and help make the correct decision about treatment over 98 percent of the time, compared to only 82 percent of the time when doing a telephone consultation to a remote site," said Meyer, who is also associate professor of neurosciences at the UCSD School of Medicine.
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