Researchers including Bernardo Quiroga, an associate professor at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, have been honored for their work helping hospitals quickly treat patients with ischemic stroke, in which blood flow to the brain is blocked.
Quiroga and his coauthors received the 2025 Jack Meredith Best Paper Award from the Journal of Operations Management for their research article “An empirical analysis of process improvement from best practice adoption: A study of stroke care best practices.”
Their research illustrates that American Heart Association and American Stroke Association guidelines are effective at speeding up hospitals’ response times for ischemic stroke treatment and can be mastered even by members of medical teams that assemble rapidly on the fly.
“It’s an immense honor to have been selected for the 2025 JOM Best Paper Award, and we’re hopeful that this recognition will aid this research to better reach the general public as a result,” Quiroga said. “I hope the wider dissemination of this research will contribute to better outcomes for patients.”
Swift stroke treatment is critical, so when an ischemic stroke patient arrives at an emergency room, specialists from across hospital departments — EMS, neurologists, pharmacists, physicians, nurses, radiologists and technicians — rush to coordinate a team response.
AHA and ASA guidelines, or “best practices,” put specific limits on how much time can optimally elapse between the onset of ischemic stroke and subsequent events like arrival at the hospital and delivery of an infusion. However, experts have questioned whether the communication of those best practices helps medical teams that assemble temporarily and whose members don’t typically collaborate.
Quiroga’s paper answers that question using data about more than 8,000 patients who received stroke care at a large comprehensive stroke center between 2009 and 2017. He and his colleagues showed that both “learning by doing” and the implementation of best practices successfully reduced the time it takes a hospital emergency department to get patients from the front door to an injection of Tissue Plasminogen Activator, which dissolves clots.
“We are used to seeing that teams that have repeated interactions learn by doing. However, since real-world stroke teams are assembled ad hoc, those repeated interactions that trigger learning by doing no longer exist,” Quiroga said. “We determined that the stroke teams learn how to do things more quickly not so much through learning by doing, but through the communication of best practices, supported with posterior performance reviews and audits.”
Joshua Hall, Milan Puskar Dean of the Chambers College, said, “Research is often incremental, a series of small steps — but sometimes, we make a giant leap. Dr. Quiroga’s research will help improve the lives of people around the world, and I’m happy that he’s been recognized for his important work in this field.”