CORAL GABLES, Fla. – More than 200,000 Americans are affected by stroke every year and the majority of those cases affect people over the age of 60, like Susie Banko’s mom.
“Strong, independent, creative,” is how Banko describes 90 year old Connie.
Her strong-minded mother insisted on driving herself on routine excursions around town until a trip to the doctor in 2019 changed everything.
Banko looked out the window of their Coral Gables apartment and was concerned to see her mothers car still in the parking lot after she’d left for a doctors appointment.
“So I started calling her cell phone and she didn’t answer,” Banko said.
Moments after she called 911, her mother was found unconscious in the rear yard of the building, the victim of a sudden stroke, but in the midst of a dire situation technology was on her side.
“If you’re having a stroke it’s like a heart attack, you need to look for symptomatic attention. The sooner you get to the hospital, the sooner you get treated and go back to your normal life,” said Dr. Guilherme Dabus, an Interventional Neuroradiolgoist at the Miami Neuroscience Center with Baptist Health.
To accelerate the opportunity for immediate attention, Coral Gables Fire Captain Daniel Amador was instrumental in spearheading a telemedicine connection directly from the city’s paramedics in the ambulance to specialists at Baptist Health.
“When a patient meets a certain criteria for a stroke we activate this system so it reduces the amount of time it takes our rescuers to get that patient to that definitive care,” Amador said.
If addressed quickly enough, stroke patients can be candidates for a medication that can keep them from suffering permanent damage.
“You have a neurologist basically in the actual unit they’re able to perform their evaluation prior to us even being close to the hospital,” Amador said.
“So that of course makes the systems of care stronger which increases this patient populations chances of doing well,” Dabus added.
Banko is convinced the impact of technology not only save her mothers life, but helped her avoid any lasting effects from the stroke.
“She has a problem with a couple of key words but other than that she’s back to her old spunky self,” she said.
The national average for getting stroke patients to what is called ‘need time’, where they could be injected with a drug designed to prevent permanent damage, is 60 minutes.
The telemedicine approach has helped Coral Gables and Baptist reduce that time to as low as 14 minutes.