Background To mitigate uncertainty that may arise in the judgment of emergency medical technicians when relying on a prehospital stroke scale at the scene, we propose a hospital selection protocol that considers the uncertainty of a prehospital stroke scale and the actual door-to-treatment durations, and we have developed a web-based system to be used with mobile devices. Methods and Results This hospital selection protocol incorporates real-time, estimated transport time obtained from Google Maps, historical median door-to-treatment duration at hospitals that only provide the standard intravenous thrombolysis treatment, and at hospitals with endovascular thrombectomy for probable large-vessel occlusion cases. We have validated the efficiency of the proposed protocol and compared it with other strategies used by emergency medical technicians when deciding on a receiving hospital. Using the proposed protocol for the triage reduces the time from onset to receiving definitive treatment by nearly 11 minutes. We found that the nearest endovascular thrombectomy-capable hospital from the scene may not be the most ideal if the door-to-treatment durations are discriminative. The results show that, when the tolerable bypass transport threshold and administration time are reduced to 9 minutes and 30.5 minutes, respectively, 228 patients out of 7678 cases, whose receiving hospitals were changed to endovascular thrombectomy-capable hospitals, received definitive treatment in a shorter time. The results of our analysis give recommendations for appropriate allowable bypass transport time for regional planning. Conclusions By applying almost-real value parameters, we have validated a web-based model, which can be universally adapted for optimal, time-saving hospital selection for patients with stroke.
Keywords: emergency medical service; hospital selection protocol; large vessel occlusion; stroke.