Bernie Quiroga, associate professor of supply chain management and program coordinator of global supply chain management, coauthored a paper that analyzes the effectiveness of urgent care for stroke victims. The paper, published in the Journal of Operations Management, uses supply chain methodology to determine best practices for patient care.
“One of the challenges of improving stroke patient urgent care is the ad hoc nature of the teams administering the care,” said Quiroga. “This problem becomes even more challenging when we consider that, in the event of a stroke, the less time the medical team takes to properly identify and treat the patient, the more likely the patient's brain function (and life) can be saved.
“Ours is the first study that analyzes empirically the mechanisms of transmission from national guidelines to practice improvement, or how those best practices are adopted to improve the time performance of stroke health professionals.”