Stroke Active Guideline Evaluation (STAGE) project

Abstract

In 2005 the American Stroke Association’s task force on the development of stroke systems established that providers and policymakers at the local, state and national levels can make significant contributions to reducing the devastating effects of stroke by working to promote coordinated systems that improve patient care. In the last few years in North America and Canada several quality stroke registers have been implemented with the aim of improving the processes of care by the diffusion and implementation of national guidelines and by the identification and correction of critical points of stroke care provided in the hospitals participating in the register. The Italian guidelines for stroke, SPREAD, have been developed with the aim of generating a tool applicable to the Italian clinical setting, able to promote the planning and linking of the assistant interventions between the different phases of the stroke care process, from the hyper-acute to the rehabilitation phase, and from primary to secondary prevention in order to harmonise and streamline the actions of the various health-care providers involved in the different phases of the diagnostic and therapeutic path of patients with stroke. The primary end-point of the Stroke Active Guideline Evaluation (STAGE) project, founded by the Italian Ministry of Health in 2003, is the diffusion, implementation and validation of the Italian Guideline for Stroke, SPREAD, in 15 acute care and 3 rehabilitative institutions across Italy. Secondary end-points are the evaluation of impact of the implementation of a workflow management in the processes of care and the identification of a national, streamlined diagnostic and therapeutic path for ischaemic stroke patients. An existing electronic patient record (EPR) has been shared with the referents of the Centres participating in the study and adapted to SPREAD’s indicators. This EPR has been augmented with the decision support system. The STAGE project represents the first Italian effort in this direction. A lot of work has to be done before this goal will be achieved, but as Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than intelligence”.