Act on Stroke – Optimization of clinical processes and workflow for stroke diagnosis and treatment

In the Helsingborg Declaration the continuum of care consisting of pre-, intra- and posthospital organization of stroke services combined with evaluation of outcome measures and dedicated quality assessments was considered as key for best outcome. Despite the evidence of such measures there are still striking disparities in organized stroke care all over Europe. Aim of this paper is to describe current concepts used for process optimization in stroke care and to evaluate if methodologies used in industry provide additional benefit in order to address this issue.

We describe the transfer of a commonly accepted industrial maturity model to stroke care addressing structural, process and outcome quality. Moreover, this tool can be used to compare different stroke services and provides valuable information for their optimization by transferring best practices from “best in class” services as well as for prioritization of improvement measures.