BEnefits of Stroke Treatment Delivered Using a Mobile Stroke Unit

There are many ways that use of a MSU might prove valuable in stroke patients, but we will focus on acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and treatment with IV tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) within 4.5 hours of symptom onset since that is the most evidence based effective emergency treatment for the most prevalent stroke diagnosis. We hypothesize that the MSU pathway will result in an overall shift towards earlier evaluation and treatment, particularly into the first hour after symptom onset, leading to substantially better outcome. We also hypothesize that as a result of improved clinical outcomes resulting from earlier treatment, the costs of a MSU program will be offset by a reduction in the costs of long term stroke care and increase in quality adjusted life years, thereby supporting more widespread use of this technology. To make MSU deployment more practical, we will confirm that a Vascular Neurologist (VN) on board the MSU can be replaced by a remote VN connected to the MSU by telemedicine (TM) thereby reducing manpower requirements and costs. The successful completion of this project will provide data on important outcomes and costs associated with the use of MSU vs SM in the United States (U.S.) that will help determine the value of integrating MSUs into the pre-hospital environment in this country. Successfully addressing our three Specific Aims (time saved/ complications encountered, utility of TM, and cost effectiveness) will provide critical information that will be needed to determine if and how a subsequent more definitive study should be conducted. We anticipate that emanating from this exploratory study would be a larger multicenter trial carried out in both urban and rural U.S. pre-hospital environments, with treatment orchestrated via TM, and having sufficient power to determine a difference in long term outcome and costs between patients managed on the two pathways, following a study design that will be tested in this exploratory trial. The present study, therefore, is the necessary first step in a process which may dramatically modify the way that acute stroke patients are managed in the U.S.