Tricia Westbrook, RN, MSN, FNP-C
Clinical Nurse Specialist, Northeast Georgia Medical Center
"We've been using GWTG-Stroke for three years and I'm a REAL advocate!  It allows us to compare our performance to the average of other stroke centers across the country.  It has also facilitated rapid-cycle performance improvement and enhanced the level of clinical care for our stroke patients.  We're now considering the GWTG-HF database and anticipate the same great benefits"

Rella Adams, PhD, RN
Senior Vice President, Valley Baptist Medical Center, Harlingen, Texas
"GWTG-Stroke Program is an excellent, organized, preliminary step that enabled Valley Baptist Medical Center to start a stroke initiative. By attending a GWTG-Stroke Getting Started seminar, we were able to understand and develop the ASA performance measures vital for 'recognition'. The most important resource for our program is the Patient Management Tool; all statistical information is at our fingertips and can be compared to all the other stroke programs around the country.  In the past six weeks, we have successfully treated three patients with tPA!"

Scott Shearer, RN, MBA
Director, Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery, St. David's Medical Center
"What makes Get With The Guidelines-Stroke different from other quality initiatives is its focus.  It makes you look at things differently by benchmarking current performance against other stroke centers, and it allows you to analyze a variety of measures throughout the continuum of care.  It helps you to identify areas that need improvement and then make positive changes quickly.  Because of this program, we've been able to greatly improve our performance in many different areas of our facility, which has an overall impact on our stroke patient outcomes.

"Over and above being an organized program with a worthwhile goal, GWTG-Stroke offers other benefits. Perhaps the greatest benefit is the program's ability to benchmark your performance against other hospitals and stroke centers as well as share ideas and best practices, which has the potential to improve stroke care in all areas of the country."

Dr. Bill Likosky
Stroke Program Director, Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, WA
"Swedish Medical Center Seattle was awarded one of health care's most prestigious honors, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's (JCAHO) 2005 Ernest Amory Codman Award for stroke care.  The award was given in the category of disease-specific management, which requires a program to demonstrate its outcomes of care and use data for quality improvement.  Get With The Guidelines served as a foundation for the award-winning quality initiative. With Get With The Guidelines, our stoke team was able to benchmark performance, identify variances to guidelines and manage timely and effective acute stroke care and continually improve care."