A new study published in The Lancet medical journal concludes that telemedicine (the use of advanced broadband technology, including interactive video, data imaging, and audio) led to better medical decisions in treating stroke victims than consulting doctors over the telephone.

That should make the folks at Virtual Radiologic Corp. giddy. The Minnetonka-based company contracts with radiologists across the United States to interpret and analyze imaging data from CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds sent over encrypted broadband networks 24 hours a day.

The study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, California Institute of Telecommunications Technology, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs research division, validates Virtual’s main raison d’etre: the lack of doctors, especially specialists in cardiology and neurology, means hospitals must look beyond their geographic borders to see top medical advice from physicians anywhere in the country.

The evolution of broadband technology allows a hospital in St. Cloud to send images from a CT scan or MRI over the Internet to a doctor in Los Angeles who analyzes the data and sends a recommendation back to the hospital in real time.

The study sought to see whether doctors consulting via telemedicine or telephone correctly recommended the use of thrombolytics (anti-clotting drugs) to 234 patients with stroke symptoms. The selection of thrombolytics was not by accident: to be effective, the drugs must be given within the first three hours of the stroke symptoms and only at the hospital.

According to the study, doctors in the telemedicine group correctly prescribed the drugs 98 percent of the cases vs. 91 percent for the telephone group.

“Stroke telemedicine consultations result in more accurate decision making compared with telephone consultation and can serve as a model for the effective of telemedicine in other medical specialities,” the study says. “The more appropriate decisions, high rates of thrombolysis use, improved data collection, low rate of intracerebral haemorrhage, low technical complications, and favorable time requirements all support the efficacy of telemedicine for making treatment decisions, and might enable more practitioners to use this medium in daily stroke care.”

The study also helped refute one major knock on telemedicine: that the technology is often faulty and unreliable and prone to crashing.

“Despite the complexity of the telemedicne system, technical problems did not affect the successful completion of the trial,” the study says. “The reliability of the site-independence and quality of service technology is shown by the fact that only one consultation was not possible because of technical failure.“

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