Early in the morning of Jan. 4, 2004, Pat Tisdale woke up feeling dizzy. Her head hurt, and she had trouble moving.
Hours later, doctors at Vail Valley Medical Center told her husband, Denver lawyer Doug Tisdale, that his 52-year-old wife had suffered a massive stroke and probably would not survive. She died two days later.
“At that moment,” Tisdale said, “I determined that no man should ever be as helpless, as clueless, as I was about stroke.”
That determination is how Vail Valley Medical Center came to have one of handful of remote systems for diagnosing and consulting on stroke treatment in the country.
The Internet-based system, subsidized in part by Tisdale, links Vail Valley to on-call stroke specialists based at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Any time of the day or night, when a potential stroke occurs, they can call us and we turn on the camera remotely and examine the patient,” said Dr. Chris Fanale, a stroke neurologist at the Colorado Neurological Institute who practices at Swedish.
A camera in Vail transmits diagnostic images over the Internet to a camera attached to a neurologist’s computer.
Four neurologists are on call to consult via the system. One advantage is that the physicians can provide that consultation from home, or wherever they happen to be when the call comes, as long as they have a computer hookup.
Swedish and its neurology team hope to eventually have such systems all over the state.
The neurological institute has bought seven of the systems. One is already at Vail, and the remaining six are slated to be installed by year’s end.
Among the hospitals that may be linked in are ones in Springfield, Yuma, Durango and Trinidad.
The systems cost about $70,000. But Williams said that as a nonprofit – and a volume purchaser – the institute was able to get them for $35,000 each.
Thanks to Tisdale, who paid half the cost, the first system went to Vail.
The system there is being tested and should be operating within weeks.
“We’re very excited,” said Dr. Chip Woodland, the hospital’s medical director. “We’ve already had some amazing recoveries of patients we did TPA on. Now, having stroke camera opens it up for us to help more people.”
TPA is an intravenous drug used to break clots that cause strokes. To be most effective, the drug must be given within three hours of the stroke, Fanale said.
The computer system, he said, will cut at least 30 minutes off the time for diagnosis and testing before treatment.
Vail Valley has no neurologist on staff or on call. The closest neurologist is at least 45 minutes away in Glenwood Springs, Woodland said.
About 700,000 people suffer a stroke each year, and more than 150,000 of them die, which makes stroke the nation’s third-leading cause of death, according to the American Heart Association.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
