Acute Stroke Timer

Release date: Apr/2/2013

Acute Stroke Timer is a tool designed by and for bedside nurses to aid in meeting the best practice target times for care of stroke patients. Among these recommendations is creating a process for achieving door to thrombolytic treatment in less than one hour.

Pre-programmed with the 2012 recommended best practice times (door to lab draw, door to MD, Door to CT, Door to Neurology Consult, and door to tPA), this tool can also be completely customized if the best practice recommendations change. Individual users may also add, rename, or adjust as many or as few timers as necessary to reflect any hospital or organization's acute stroke treatment process targets.

The timer allows one touch initiation of a stroke event, and informs with individual event countdown timers as well as visual and audio cues as each treatment process milestone nears. When a process is complete (labs drawn, MD to see patient), one tap stops the individual timer and preserves the time for charting later if necessary. Each event is stored for reference based on the initiation time (no PHI is stored).

The goal of this tool is to keep the bedside nurse aware of approaching deadlines for benchmarked processes as well as to quickly and easily record the time of benchmarked events for later documentation. Elegant and simple, this tool is not "one more thing to do" but is instead a welcomed assistant to improving the care of and outcomes for acute stroke patients.

This project was the brain-child of Ed Keating, RN, CEN. Thanks Ed for all the advice and input with this project. I hope you and your staff find it useful in the ER.