Ascension Via Christi’s Wichita, Kansas, hospitals recently launched a Pulmonary Embolism Response Team, or PERT, allowing the hospital to respond with a standardized approach to assessing and treating clots blocking an artery in the lungs.
The initiative has an added boost in that it is using an artificial intelligence (AI) software program that the FDA approved for pulmonary embolisms last year. Ascension Via Christi’s Comprehensive Stroke Center, based at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis, has successfully used a feature of the same software program for issuing stroke alerts for the past five years.
The team is using the PE triage and notification program to help identify, assess and develop a treatment plan for patients suspected to have a pulmonary embolism within three minutes of completion of their CT scan.
If the system’s preliminary read of the CT scan detects what appears to be a PE, it sends notifications and images to the response team’s smartphones.
“Radiology is still reading the scans and offering their professional advice,” said Abdel-Ghanie Abu-Samra, MD, the Ascension Medical Group Via Christi pulmonologist who serves as the response team’s physician champion and medical director of the Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Medical Intensive Care Unit. “This rapid, multidisciplinary approach simply expedites and enhances the care that can offer our patients 24 hours a day.”
The 15-member PERT, led by pulmonologists, includes interventional radiologists, cardiologists, emergency physicians and hospitalists who work together to explore patients’ best options and get them the individualized care they need as quickly as possible.
Thanks to new technology and therapeutics, today’s treatment options include medication therapy, a clot-busting infusion or clot-retrieval procedure, all of which are available at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis.
“Having so many different treatment options allows us to tailor the treatment to the individual needs of the patient versus a one-size-fits all approach,” Dr. Abu-Samra said.
