Health and Social Care Board of Northern Ireland
Belfast, United Kingdom
About DESTINE
The Challenge
Stroke is the leading cause of severe disability. Worldwide, 15M people will suffer a stroke each year. Fortunately, there are effective treatments for severe ischemic stroke: medical treatment (thrombolysis) and Endovascular Therapy (EVT).
While medical therapy is available at most acute stroke centers, EVT availability has been centralized to large hospitals with specialized equipment and personnel.
Minutes matter to stroke patients – time is brain.
Is it better for patients to bypass a non-EVT capable centre in favour of an EVT equipped centre, or should they receive medical therapy as soon as possible and then be transferred to an EVT hospital?
The transport decision is context specific!
The Solution
Through years of published research, DESTINE has developed a decision support tool that optimizes patient outcomes by identifying the best destination for suspected stroke patients.
DESTINE’s sophisticated algorithm incorporates the progression of the disease with geographic and health system variables. The tool creates population-level easy to read transport maps that are cloud-accessible, regionally customized, and evidence-based. Learn more about the science behind DESTINE Health here.
Using DESTINE Health will:
- Give you confidence that your EVT access strategy is evidence-based.
- Save significant downstream costs within the health system by maximizing good patient outcomes.
- Get more patients home to their families.
The Software
DESTINE is a web-based interactive tool that allows users to enter your health system’s parameters, (specific hospital treatment and transfer efficiencies), in order to produce maps of your local area showing the best transport routing for stroke patients to access endovascular therapy (mothership vs. drip and ship). Furthermore, the analysis can be customized for different paramedic stroke screen tools (e.g. FAST and LAMS). This enables health systems to develop evidence-based geo-specific transport protocols for effective use of their current acute stroke systems and visualize ways to optimize them in the future. No integration with existing IT is required.
“These maps allowed SNIS greater certainty in putting forth legislation on the best transportation method for stroke patients. Additionally, these maps also provided impetus for designated stroke hospitals to improve their efficiency of treatments, and which hospitals are best to focus on based on geography.”
— Marie Williams, CAE (SNIS, Executive Director)
Executive Team
Noreen Kamal
PEng, PhD
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Noreen is an engineer and researcher with a specialization in interactive visual analytics and human-computer interaction. She brings years of experience in private industry and over a decade of experience in improving health care systems.
Jessalyn Holodinsky
PhD
Co-Founder, Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Executive Officer
Jessalyn is an epidemiologist specializing in predictive modelling for stroke outcomes. She developed the science behind DESTINE as part of her PhD dissertation. She has become a sought after speaker in the area of acute ischemic stroke patient transport for local and international conferences.
Scientific Advisory Committee
Dr. Michael Hill
Professor, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary; Stroke Neurologist, Foothills Medical Centre
Dr. Mahesh Jayaraman
Associate Professor, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University; Director Neurovascular Center; Sr Member, Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery
Dr. Michael Mazya
Consultant in Neurology, Karolinska University Hospital; Chair, Swedish Acute Neurology Society
Dr. Ryan McTaggart
Associate Professor Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University; Director Interventional Radiology
Dr. Bijoy Menon
Associate Professor, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary; Stroke Neurologist, Foothills Medical Centre
Our Clients
We are proud to have the following businesses and communities as our premier clients currently implementing our stroke triage mapping software and creating better Acute Ischemic Stroke patient care protocols.
Hyogo College of Medicine
Nishinomiya, Japan
Karolinska University Hospital
Stockholm, Sweden
Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery
Fairfax, Virginia, USA
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Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE)
Hamburg, Germany
Vestre Viken Hospital Trust
Viken, Norway