How We Compare

Hospitals use patient outcome and performance reports to measure the safety and quality of care they provide. When you're choosing a hospital, patient outcomes information can help you make an informed decision. El Camino Health tracks both outcome measures and performance measures. As you can see, our average performance continues to improve, maintaining an average of over 98% for all measures for all patients.

We also rigorously benchmark ourselves against other hospitals. Comparisons can be found on the GWTG Public Reporting website. Additional key results are described below.

Expert Care for All Types of Strokes

El Camino Health's team of neurologists, neurointerventional radiologists and neurosurgeons has long been on the forefront of neurologic procedures for treating all types of strokes:

• Ischemic stroke
• Hemorrhagic stroke
• Ruptured neurovascular dissections
• Neurovascular aneurysms

Our team at the Peter C. Fung, MD, Stroke Center is experienced at recognizing and treating the most urgent type of stroke: ischemic stroke. This potentially life-threatening situation occurs when there’s a complete blockage of blood flow to a vessel in the brain or leading to the brain.

Emergency Care for Stroke

If you or a loved one needs care for a suspected stroke, you can be sure that you’ll receive the most efficient, expert care at our hospital. When patients with suspected stroke arrive to El Camino Health by emergency medical services (EMS) after calling 911, our emergency room is notified before the paramedics arrive with the patient. To ensure patients get immediate care, our stroke team experts are waiting at the door to begin a highly coordinated process. Our stroke team involved in this initial care includes:

• Emergency physicians and nurses
• Laboratory and computed tomography (CT) technicians
• Radiologists
• Neurologists
• Neurointerventionalists

This team works together to assure that patients receive immediate care, which can lead to fewer long-term complications and better outcomes. Better outcomes may include enhanced mobility at time of hospital discharge and more patients discharged from the hospital directly to their homes.

We are continuously assessing and revising our emergency stroke care process to ensure we are delivering the speediest, safest care with the latest research and technology to our patients. Our seamless process allows us to provide assessment and care to stroke patients within minutes of arrival — whether by EMS or by private vehicle. As a result of our skills and high standards, we've achieved 100 percent compliance with all essential measures for emergency stroke care.

Tenecteplase (TNK)

The first line care for ischemic stroke patients is treatment with a thrombolytic to break up a clot. Thrombolytic therapy which includes tPA drugs, alteplase (Activase) and tenecteplase (TNK), is the gold standard treatment for ischemic stroke. At El Camino Health, we currently use Tenecteplase, which can only be given within four-and-a-half hours of symptom onset. If the patient arrives within that time window, our team works aggressively to provide this treatment — for eligible patients — as quickly as possible.

Nearly 2 million brain cells die every minute during a stroke. For this reason, it is essential to treat stroke as quickly as possible. At El Camino Health, our goal is to treat ischemic stroke patients as quickly as possible, and no longer than 30 minutes after they’ve arrived at the hospital, which is in line with the latest nationwide American Heart Association/American Stroke Association Target Stroke Phase III initiative. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to keep our treatment times to a minimum.

Mechanical Thrombectomy

For stroke patients with the most severe ischemic stroke, the stroke team at El Camino Health in Mountain View offers an advanced treatment called mechanical thrombectomy. Mechanical thrombectomy is a treatment provided by specialized physicians called neurointerventionalists. These highly skilled physicians can remove clots that block large blood vessels using a device called a stent retriever that grabs clots and removes them, in order to reestablish blood flow to the brain.

As with Tenecteplase treatment, our goal is to provide thrombectomy care as quickly as possible in order to improve patient outcomes. Research released in February 2018 from the DAWN and DEFUSE-3 trials found that this treatment can be effective for some patients who've been experiencing stroke symptoms for up to 24 hours prior to treatment. The chart below shows the time elapsed from patient arrival to thrombectomy procedure start times. El Camino Health is rigorously working to continuously improve timely initiation of thrombectomies.

Outcomes After Stroke Treatment

Our Stroke Center is conscientious about measuring patient outcomes for both IV thrombolytics (currently with Tenecteplase) and mechanical thrombectomy treatment. We do this in three main ways:

1. Complications Following Treatment
   All complications that arise after stroke treatment are closely scrutinized by our stroke medical director and members of our stroke team. The most common adverse outcome for both Tenecteplase and mechanical thrombectomy is bleeding in the brain within 72 hours after treatment. This complication occurs in approximately 6 percent of patients treated with Tenecteplase. Bleeding in the brain most commonly occurs in patients who have a high stroke severity.

   
   

2. Patient Discharge Locations
   Another way of tracking outcomes is to monitor the location of patient discharge. Ideally, a patient will recover well enough in the hospital to be discharged back to their home. Patients who are discharged from the hospital directly to their homes have a higher degree of function than those who are discharged to another type of facility.



   Also ideal, some patients need to be discharged to an inpatient acute rehabilitation facility. Other patients need to be discharged to a skilled nursing facility (SNF). Alternatively, patients are discharged to another acute care hospital often to align with their insurance policies (i.e. Kaiser). For some patients with very severe strokes — or those who were not healthy before their stroke — patients are discharged to hospice care.

   At El Camino Health, our goal is to treat your stroke and related symptoms, and to help you regain function and return to your daily life as quickly as possible. Below are graphs of patient discharge locations after TNK treatment and thrombectomy showing that the majority of patients are able to discharge home.