Outcome Sciences, Inc. (OUTCOME), the leading provider of patient
registries, studies, and technologies for evaluating real-world
outcomes, and REACH Call, the leading provider of web-based telemedicine
services, today announced a partnership to integrate stroke-telemedicine
data into the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke
program.
“We are excited about this partnership and the ability to help our
customers simplify the operational complexities around stroke care:
compliance, certification, and reimbursement”
The goals of this collaboration are to:
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Share knowledge between rural emergency departments and specialists at
major medical centers;
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Gain new insights into the continuum of care for stroke patients
treated via telemedicine;
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Streamline data collection for hospitals participating in the Get With
The Guidelines–Stroke quality program and Joint Commission
certification;
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Support reimbursement by helping hospitals achieve Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recommendations for stroke registry
participation and;
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Support reimbursement by helping hospitals collect stroke measures for
the CMS Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) program.
The American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program,
for which OUTCOME serves as the data collection and coordination center
and provides the Patient Management Tool® application, is a
continuous quality improvement initiative designed to track and improve
outcomes for stroke patients. Over 1,400 hospitals and thousands of
physicians participating in the program are able to compare their
performance with national benchmarks for key elements of stroke care
such as timeliness of diagnosis, use of thrombolytic therapy, and
initiation of rehabilitation. Peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated
significant improvement in composite care quality as a result of this
program.