What to expect in Episode 18
Ep 18: Dr Robert Mikulik | Ideas for a Revolution
Dr Robert Mikulik has big ideas, and some of these are changing the future of healthcare.
He is Professor of Neurology and the Director of the Stroke Research Programme at St. Anne’s University Hospital and Masaryk University in Brno, Chief of Physicians at Tomas Bata Hospital in Zlin, one of the co-founders of the ICRC, which is one of the biggest research infrastructural projects in the Czech Republic, and a founding member and long-serving chair of ESO-EAST, the program to improve stroke care in Central and Eastern European Countries.
He’s also the founder and coordinator of the stroke registry RES-Q, which, as he explains in this interview recorded in Maastricht, began as a tool to benchmark quality in Eastern Europe.
“When we started to discuss quality improvement in Eastern Europe, the first major barrier was that we had no data about what the quality was. So we realized that we needed to have some tool that would measure the quality. And that was the start of RES-Q. . .”
Ten years later that tool has become sophisticated beyond expectations, Robert says.
“RES-Q is not a registry anymore. It’s kind of like an intelligence platform that does a lot of automated analysis, you know, benchmarking and many other things. So the registry is only a small part.”
Robert is the mastermind behind RES-Q+, an EU-funded project that promises to be a comprehensive solution for improving acute stroke care and life after stroke. It’s a revolutionary concept whose aims are to offer a fully automated tool for obtaining and processing data, evaluating that data, and providing feedback to care providers through artificial intelligence-based virtual assistants that precisely target problem areas. Finally, it will create virtual assistants for stroke patients that monitor their condition.
In this episode:
• Do awards change clinical practice?
• How RES-Q emerged out of ESO-EAST
• Growing beyond a registry
• The 3 barriers RES-Q + must overcome
• AI’s side effect
• Developing a new comprehensive center
• Quality improvement is more managerial than medical
• Medicine as “the most meaningful option”
• Why stroke neurology
• Introducing simulation training to stroke
• How big ideas arrive
• The next big idea
• What medicine and aviation have in common
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE BELOW
Dr Robert Mikulik is a Czech neurologist known for pioneering acute stroke treatments in the Czech Republic, leading stroke research, and serving as the long-standing chair of ESO-EAST, the program to enhance stroke care across Eastern Europe. He is also, of course, the founder and coordinator of the stroke care quality registry RES-Q, and its AI-powered next-gen version, RES-Q+, which is being greeted as the beginning of a healthcare revolution.
In this conversation recorded in Maastricht in May, Robert explains the barriers RES-Q + is designed to overcome, shares his concern about a potential AI side effect, and talks about what aviation has in common with medicine.
RES Q is the evaluation partner for the Angels Awards and Robert has been close to the project from the start – although when the awards were first mooted, he had some questions . . .