How Providence Saint John’s sustains excellence in stroke care

The stroke program at Santa Monica, Calif.-based Providence Saint John’s Health Center operates as part of a highly integrated, collaborative care model — enabling it to become one of the 13% of hospitals nationwide to earn the American Heart Association’s highest stroke care quality designations for six years in a row. 

Jason Tarpley, MD, the stroke medical director for both Providence Saint John’s and the Providence Southern California Division, shared with Becker’s how the program sustains high performance and a commitment to innovation.

Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Question: Providence Saint John’s has sustained top-tier stroke quality recognition from the American Heart Association for six consecutive years. What factors have been most critical to maintaining consistently high performance?  

Dr. Jason Tarpley: The most important factor to achieving consistently high performance in the arena of stroke is a philosophy to always get better. The people who make up our stroke team work every day to make any possible iterative improvement in patient care. From nurses, to coordinators and managers to the stroke neurologists who see every stroke patient and the neurointerventionists and neurosurgeons performing advanced procedures, we have one simple goal — to get better every day. This philosophy drives our tireless work on protocols and policies that ensure consistent top-notch care, the research aiming to develop new and better approaches to care, and our quality improvement initiatives.

Q: The stroke program sits within the broader neurosurgical care ecosystem led by the Providence Saint John’s Neuroscience Institute. How has that structure enhanced stroke care delivery? 

JT: By embedding our stroke program within the Providence Saint John’s Neuroscience Institute, we leverage an integrated care model that spans the entire patient journey — from real-time neurodiagnostics and award-winning treatment times to coordinated inpatient care directed by expert neuro hospitalists, outpatient follow-up, and rehabilitation services. This structure also supports contracting processes to ensure service levels for both contracted and tele-neuro services remain patient-centered, delivering on our strategic promise of quality. 

Together, these elements enable seamless collaboration across providers and programs, driving consistently exceptional outcomes. Our interventionists, including neurointerventionists and neurosurgeons, are part of the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, which functions to provide collaborative interventional support to our non-interventional colleagues. This seamless collaboration between our interventional and non-interventional experts has been and will always be central to our success as a stroke program. This ensures every patient gets the right treatment, whether it’s medical, surgical or both.

Q: How do you approach the balance between adopting new, innovative technologies and maintaining consistently high outcomes? What factors help determine which technologies or approaches to invest in? 

JT: We believe Saint John’s was put on this earth to improve stroke care. So, again, the idea of “getting better every day” is our guiding principle. When we select clinical trials to bring in, we select trials that have the potential to solve a treatment gap or unmet need. When we do retrospective research from our massive database of stroke patients, we focus on how that information can help us take better care of the next patient. When we debrief every case of stroke, we ask, “How can we go faster or do better tomorrow?”