Farrell hospital gets state-of-the-art stroke equipment

FARRELL, Pa. — When UPMC Horizon got some new equipment last summer that instantly linked up emergency stroke victims to neurosurgeons in Pittsburgh, hospital President Joel Yuhas thought it was a valuable resource.

Now, he’s just grateful it was there.

The equipment took on new significance for the hospital president when his 71-year-old mother Beverly Yuhas suffered a stroke while visiting and needed immediate care.

Beverly Yuhas of Elyria, Ohio, was visiting her son late last summer when she started getting a chill and then couldn’t communicate.

“She mumbled something, and then half of her face began to droop,” Joel Yuhas said.

She was rushed by ambulance to UPMC Horizon’s Farrell campus and was taken to the emergency room where the hospital had recently acquired telemedicine equipment — a sophisticated Internet-based videoconferencing system that allows the Pittsburgh doctors to see and speak to patients and others in the emergency room instantly.

Dr. Tudor Jovin, a vascular neurosurgeon at Stroke Institute of UPMC in Pittsburgh, was working when Mrs. Yuhas was brought in.

“She came in with a pretty severe neurological deficit,” Dr. Jovin said.

She was given a powerful clot-busting drug, tissue plasminogen activator or tPA, and taken by medical helicopter to the UPMC Stroke Center, located at Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Jovin said they will leave patients at the local hospital that they feel can be safely managed, but bring the more severe cases to Pittsburgh.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com