Modeling the Optimal Transportation for Acute Stroke Treatment: The Impact of the Drip-and-Drive Paradigm.

Background and Purpose- Health systems are faced with the challenge of ensuring fast access to appropriate therapy for patients with acute stroke. The paradigms primarily discussed are mothership and drip and ship. Less attention has been focused on the drip-and-drive (DD) paradigm. Our aim was to analyze whether and under what conditions DD would predict the greatest probability of good outcome for patients with suspected ischemic stroke in Northwestern Germany. Methods- Conditional probability models based on the decay curves for endovascular therapy and intravenous thrombolysis were created to determine the best transport paradigm, and results were displayed using map visualizations. Our study area consisted of the federal states of Lower Saxony, Hamburg, and Schleswig-Holstein in Northwestern Germany covering an area of 64 065 km