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Each year more than 700,000 Americans suffer from a stroke; about 25% of them die, and 15–30% remain permanently disabled. More than 1 million Americans and their families live with the disabling effects of stroke. The direct and indirect costs of stroke care exceed $51 billion annually. To help reduce the nation’s stroke burden, in addition to efforts to prevent strokes, we need to improve the quality of care provided to patients with acute stroke and thus reduce death and disability from stroke. However, a major problem is that while evidence-based medical guidelines for stroke care have been developed, as well as new and improved diagnostic and treatment tools, many hospitals still do not have the organization, staff, and equipment to effectively diagnose and treat acute stroke patients.
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In response to this urgent public health need, Congress provided funding in 2001 to CDC to implement state-based registries that measure, track, and improve the delivery and quality of stroke care. Congress further directed that this project be named the Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Registry, after the late U.S. Senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia who suffered a fatal stroke in 2000 while serving in Congress. |
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In June 2004 CDC funded four state health departments to establish statewide Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Registries with the mission of monitoring and improving the quality of acute stroke care in samples of acute care hospitals in their states. Those four states were Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. In their first year, these state registries have created advisory councils to provide expert guidance, recruited and trained hospitals to participate in the registry, and began collecting data on acute stroke care. The data collected will then be analyzed by the states and CDC to guide quality improvement interventions at the hospital level that will help close the gap between guidelines and practice through partnership with hospital doctors and administrators.
Coverdell Registry States 2004
Source: CDC
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