Yixiong Zhang, Yingxia Jing , Yimin Zhu , Tao Jiang, Xianyi Tang, Weichen Yi
Abstract
To inspect whether time management with radio frequency identification technology (RFID) reduces symptom onset-to-intravenous thrombolysis time (OTT) in acute ischemic stroke (AIS).
Introduction
The incidence rate of ischemic stroke in China is 17.7%, twice the international rate [1]. Time is an important factor in the emergency care of patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke (AIS) [2]. Every one-minute delay in the patient’s AIS emergency care procedure can reduce the patient’s brain cells by 1.9 million [3]. It is recommended that intravenous thrombolytic therapy should be administered within 4.5 hours after the onset of AIS [4]. The first 60 minutes from symptom onset to intravenous thrombolysis (OTT) is the golden window in which to obtain medical treatment [4].
Materials and Methods
The eligible cases were divided into three groups according to the stage in which RFID is implemented in the patient’s emergency care process: the traditional group before the implementation of the RFID technology (i.e., cases from September 2019 to August 2020), the in-hospital RFID group where the RFID technology is implemented at the in-hospital phase (i.e., cases from September 2020 to October 2021), and the whole process group when the RFID technology is extended to include the pre-hospital phase (i.e., cases from November 2021 to June 2022).
Results
The shortest ODT was observed in the whole process RFID group and longest was in the in-hospital RFID group (F = 6.575, P = 0.002). There was no significant difference between the ODT comparing the traditional group to the whole process RFID group (p = 0.661). Both in-hospital and whole process RFID groups showed a significantly reduced DNT of 33.95±26.80 minutes and 32.59±25.45 minutes compared to the DNT of 125±43.16 minutes in the traditional group (F = 121.857, P<0.001). The OTT was 144.31±47.96 minutes in the whole process RFID group, and 183.35±85.47 minutes in the in-hospital RFID group, both significantly shorter than 235.53±57.27 minutes in the traditional group (F = 10.377, P<0.001).
Discussion
However, few studies report on the application of the RFID technology in the emergency care of patients with acute and critical conditions, such as stroke patients, to monitor and record the emergency time points to streamline the emergency care process. This study confirmed that the application of RFID technology could accurately and automatically record each time point of the AIS treatment, enabling reliable detections of time-delayed aspects of treatment, thereby targeting specific aspects of the emergency care process and developing quality control measures.
Conclusions
Time management with RFID was proved to be effective in reducing DNT, and might also reduce ODT of pre-hospital emergency procedure in AIS patients with thrombolysis treatment, thus OTT of the whole emergency process was reduced.
Citation: Zhang Y, Jing Y, Zhu Y, Jiang T, Tang X, Yi W (2023) Radio frequency identification technology reduce intravenous thrombolysis time in acute ischemic stroke. PLoS ONE 18(7): e0288207. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288207
Editor: Yimin Chen, Foshan Sanshui District People’s Hospital, CHINA
Received: March 31, 2023; Accepted: June 21, 2023; Published: July 19, 2023
Copyright: © 2023 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information files.
Funding: This study was funded by Hunan Provincial Health Commission (D202310008879) and Key Project of Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Innovation (2020 SK 1015). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288207#abstract0
