Focus on stroke prevention with Adrian Flowerday
25 January 2024
Today is Stroke Prevention Day. With stroke destroying people’s lives every five minutes, this year the Stroke Association is focusing on encouraging people to check their pulses for atrial fibrillation (AF) – a condition which lots of people are living with.
Atrial fibrillation, or AF, is when your heart beats with an irregular rhythm and it is a major risk factor for stroke. AF is a common condition, but is cited as causing one in five strokes and there are around half a million people who are living with AF without even knowing it.
If you take a look at this insightful video from the Stroke Association, you will learn that someone has a stroke from AF / irregular pulse every half an hour. However, once you’ve been diagnosed with AF with the right treatment it can be quite a manageable condition. So you can see how important it is to find out if you do have AF!
We support this important campaign which is all about carrying out a simple pulse check to find out if your pulse is regular. At Graphnet, we have tried and tested technology and pathways that help to identify whether a person has AF, which can be done with simple and routine screening or checks.
How can AF-related strokes be avoided?
AF can cause blood clots which can in turn lead to stroke. The problem is, that not everyone has obvious symptoms of AF. Opportunistic screening is a valuable resource for identifying early symptoms and is an important focus for the NHS, who is rolling out screening to help with diagnosis of conditions such as AF. Screening can help you to identify early symptoms of AF and intervene as soon as possible, helping to improve patient outcomes.
At Graphnet, we are perfectly positioned to support screening programmes, as we’ve been doing remote patient monitoring since 2001. We even have our own unique device, CAREPORTAL®, a class 11 medical device which allows people to input health measurements and even take ECGs reading while in a community setting.
We’re helping clients across the NHS with their screening – and providing technology for screening – supporting services to deliver the NHS England initiative Innovation for Healthcare Inequalities Programme (InHIP).
This programme is addressing local healthcare inequalities experienced by deprived and other under-served populations, while minimising health inequalities and improving access to health technologies and medicines. It aligns with the national Core20PLUS5 approach, which again is about reducing health inequalities in NHS services such as cardiovascular disease.
We have also recently launched an updated version of cardiovascular monitoring functionality, which provides the opportunity to screen, assess and potentially detect undiagnosed atrial fibrillation (AF) and hypertension, two conditions strongly associated with an increased risk of stroke.
What are Graphnet's customers doing?
We’ve been carrying out quite a lot of screening recently with our clients, helping to detect health issues early and revealing undiagnosed medical problems that people are unaware of. The results are really impressive.
Take a look at this story about a potential stroke avoidance at a Learning Disabilities care home in Radford. By using remote monitoring in a care home, an alert was picked up for a young person who had had several TIAs. Once the alert was picked up by the clinical team, steps were put in place to avoid a stroke.
If you want to carry out targeted screening to identify people with AF for example, evidence points to population health management software coupled with remote monitoring technology being incredibly effective.
Because our population health management and remote monitoring platforms are integrated, we are able to support customers in finding cohorts of people with an elevated risk of stroke. Many of our customers then go on to set up opportunistic screening walk in clinics to test these cohorts for AF through cholesterol and blood pressure tests. Assessing these three key measures can be done quickly and by inviting a targeted audience, rather than randomly selecting, it doesn’t take too long and has really impressive results.
This then leads to carrying out early intervention techniques and giving health promotional advice to reduce deterioration within that group.
We know there’s a lot of great work being carried out to prevent strokes but a lot more can be done and screening is a really effective way of identifying conditions such as AF. At Graphnet we are capable of engaging to prevent stroke and there are huge opportunities for this expanding. The technology and systems are in place already.
Peter Levene, Director of Clinical Research at Graphnet says:
On this Stroke Prevention Day, we are reminded of its importance by new figures, from the British Heart Foundation showing that people who died prematurely of cardiovascular conditions has reached its highest total for 14 years. In 2022, at an average rate of 750 per week, people under 75 died from heart attacks, coronary heart disease and stroke reversing the trend from 10 years previously where deaths were falling.
The Graphnet team’s digital health platform, DOC@HOME, incorporates a unique, intuitive triage support interface for assessment, identification and reporting of risk conditions. These include undiagnosed atrial fibrillation and uncontrolled hypertension, considered to be major risk factors of stroke. Our population health and integrated care records provide clinicians with insights for action to prevent stroke and reduce untimely death from cardiovascular disease. To know more about how digital health can impact stroke prevention, please get in touch.
