Sergio Macias credits a robot with helping to save his life.
Arriving at work in October 2007, he felt pressure on his chest, followed by blurry vision, dry heaves and tingling in his face, arm and feet.
Then "it felt like someone hit me in the back of the head with a bat," he recalled. A coworker took him to St. Mary Mercy Hospital in Livonia.
Staff checked his symptoms. But the diagnosis that he had a stroke came with the help of a robot that hooked up Macias, 46, of Livonia to a stroke team at St. Joseph Mercy/Oakland hospital in Pontiac.
Part of a project to improve stroke diagnosis and treatment started by St. Joseph Mercy in 2006, the Michigan Stroke Network uses robots and other telemedical tools to see and talk to patients.
Usually, smaller and rural hospitals that do not have specialists on site around the clock report symptoms verbally to stroke specialists at nearby hospitals. The robotic systems improve on that, by letting doctors see and talk to patients as if they were at their bedside.
"A subjective verbal report is useful, but it's not as good as seeing the patients," said Dr. Omar Qahwash, a St. Joseph neurosurgeon. Robots "tease out" more useful information, he said, such as which patients have the type of stroke caused by a blockage that benefits from a clot-busting drug, and which ones have strokes causing bleeding in the brain, a problem treated with surgery.
Since St. Joseph started the network, 490 patients have been evaluated with robots in the Michigan program. The system hooks up specialists at St. Joseph with patients at 31 Michigan hospitals, some as far as 220 miles away. Hospitals in Michigan's program lease the robots for $36,000 a year, rather than buying them for $250,000.
Outside of Michigan, more than 50 medical centers use robots for the diagnosis of stroke and related problems, according to a spokeswoman for Intouch Health, a Santa Barbara, Calif., company that specializes in telemedicine.
Jack Weiner, CEO and president of St. Joseph Mercy, said the system has helped hospitals in the stroke network see 75% of patients within three hours, as previous guidelines recommended, compared with 3% of patients seen that soon nationwide.
"We know it is saving money in outlying communities" because fewer patients need to be transported by air ambulances for care, Weiner added.
Qahwash said robots can't replace a physician on site evaluating and treating patients. "But of course, in today's times, that's not always possible," he said. "This way, we can offer stroke care to a wider number of people who are underserved."
Macias said he had no complications from his stroke. Without the robot, he said, "I'm not sure I would have been so lucky." To see more of the Detroit Free Press, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.freep.com Copyright (c) 2009, Detroit Free Press Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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