Each minute an acute ischemic stroke goes untreated destroys roughly 1.9 million neurons.
Yet door-to-needle times — the interval from a patient’s emergency department arrival to the clot-dissolving medication — still vary between hospitals, between facilities in one health system, even between patients in the same program. The cause is rarely the neurologist. Specialist access alone doesn’t resolve delays in stroke-code activation, imaging, communication, medication or unclear team roles.
An integrated telestroke partnership treats door-to-needle as a whole-system measure and removes those delays where they occur. With this approach, one 352-bed hospital in California cut average door-to-needle from 95.9 minutes to 43 within three months and, year over year, treated 43% more patients for acute ischemic stroke per month.
A Texas community hospital kept door-to-needle consistently under 45 minutes across its campuses while increasing teleneurology consults 600% over five years and reporting fewer transfers.
Inside, you’ll learn:
- Where stroke programs lose door-to-needle minutes — and who owns each fix
- Key insights on how to build a teleStroke program to optimize door-to-needle time, like how running the virtual evaluation during imaging can cut up to 20 minutes, based on what our teleNeurology teams have learned across hundreds of hospitals and millions of patient encounters
- The measurement framework behind faster, more reliable stroke care