Introduction:
Patient specific stroke management documentation is essential for seamless care, to guide treatment, and for safe and comprehensive discharge planning. To ensure consistency with information across the care continuum a comprehensive end-to-end documentation platform was developed by the Victorian Telemedicine Inpatient Service (VTIS), an extension of the successful BUILDS Telestroke Unit pilot study at Echuca Regional Health.
Methods:
The VTIS platform was developed using the PDSA: Plan, Do, Study, Act framework. Consultation with stroke clinicians, coordinators and survivors highlighted the importance of diagnostic certainty, a management plan addressing stroke risk factors, details of follow up care, further investigations, and medication recommendations.
The VTIS platform delivers comprehensive management plans at the hyperacute, stroke unit and discharge stages of care. Direct linkage to data from the Victorian Stroke Telemedicine (VST) hyperacute stroke service was embedded and variables aligned with Australian Stroke Clinical Registry (AuSCR) datasets.
Information collected can be used to generate patient documentation and exported to contribute directly to AuSCR, improving efficiencies with documentation and reducing data collection burden.
Results: The VTIS platform, implemented in May 2024, follows the patient through the entire stroke unit journey. Evaluation data will be presented including number of cases, data completion, time saving efficiencies and discharge information performance.
Conclusion: VTIS has enabled the development of the most comprehensive stroke documentation platform within Australia, improving efficiency, stroke documentation and oversight of the patient journey.
Relevance to clinical practice or patient experience: Patients now have access to a comprehensive acute and inpatient stroke service via VST/VTIS (via Ambulance Victoria). The development of a dedicated patient management platform integrates all the information relating to a patient’s acute stroke journey. This will improve efficiencies for the health services in regards to their quality improvement efforts and benchmarking via AuSCR.