Medical technology pioneer Forest Devices, Inc. (FDI) today announced a commitment to improve healthcare delivery for stroke patients in Alberta, forming a collaboration with Alberta Health Services (AHS) to evaluate and test technologies that can improve patient outcomes and health system performance by empowering emergency first responders to make informed decisions regarding care for stroke patients.
FDI’s stroke diagnostic platform, AlphaStroke, is the first technology that supports paramedics and other medical first responders in identifying stroke in the field so they can make the best triage decisions for patients.
In Alberta, two comprehensive stroke hospitals and approximately 500 ambulances serve a population of over four million people living in over 650,000 square kilometers. The AHS/FDI collaboration was enabled by way of the Prehospital Stroke Diagnostics Project, which was created by AHS in 2019 with the aim of testing an innovative solution that increases the accuracy and speed of prehospital diagnosis of stroke. The project team assessed 14 technologies and ultimately determined that AlphaStroke, and the vision of FDI, aligned most closely with the objectives of AHS and worth testing in real world settings.