HeartRescue Project

The HeartRescue Project, funded by the Medtronic Foundation, is dedicated to improving how sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is recognized, treated and measured in the United States. Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science joins the country's leading experts, including Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Washington and American Medical Response (AMR) to identify best practices and systematically reduce the number of people who die each year from SCA.

To learn more about sudden cardiac arrest, please visit: www.heartrescueproject.com/heartrescue-project/sudden-cardiac-arrest/

To learn more about the HeartRescue Project, please visit: www.heartrescueproject.com

Questions or comments can be directed to:

crsinfo@uphs.upenn.edu
215-746-4630

Pennsylvania HeartRescue Project

The vision of the Pennsylvania HeartRescue Project is to work with key partners to establish a statewide infrastructure that ensures every SCA victim will receive life-saving, state-of-the-art care at the scene, en route to and in the hospital. Our mission is to improve SCA survival by 50 percent through:

• Improved EMS response with high-performance CPR
  • PA Resuscitation Academies
  • High-functioning EMS agency Train-the-Trainer Academies
• Data collection with the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES)
• Quality in-hospital care
• Community Outreach and Educational Programs to ensure prompt, high quality bystander CPR

CARES: Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival

Improving Cardiac Care to Save More Lives:

Each year, 300,000 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) occur in the United States. Almost two-thirds are treated by emergency medical services (EMS) providers. Community rates of OHCA survival are generally low (2%–40%). Quickly implementing the "chain of survival" is crucial to surviving OHCA, but many communities cannot measure how effectively EMS providers activate the chain. Without adequate performance measures, these communities lose opportunities to improve emergency cardiac care and save lives.

The Pennsylvania HeartRescue Project provides coordination of the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), which is a secure, web-based data management system created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated with Emory University and the American Heart Association to help increase OHCA survival rates. Communities enrolled in CARES enter local EMS and hospital data and generate their own reports. EMS agencies in Pennsylvania learn more about their system performance through de-identified aggregate statistics at the local, state, or national level and discover promising practices that could improve emergency cardiac care. Cardiac receiving hospitals enter patient outcomes into CARES, which will enable Pennsylvania communities to identify out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rates for the first time.

Helping Communities Identify Opportunities for Improvement

With a goal of increasing out-of-hospital SCA survival, the Pennsylvania HeartRescue Project supports CARES and is committed to assisting EMS, fire, first responders, hospitals, and the larger community to identify:

• Who is affected
• When and where cardiac arrests occur
• Which elements of the system are functioning well and those that could work more effectively
• How changes can be made to improve cardiac arrest outcomes
• How emergency cardiac treatment can be improved

Working Together to Improve Emergency Cardiac Care

The CARES system:

• Uses a secure Web database with restricted access for authorized users.
• Has software that collects and links data sources to create a single de-identified record for each OHCA event.
• Uses a simple, HIPAA-compliant methodology to protect confidentiality.
• Accepts a variety of input methods, such as uploaded data files or online data entry.
• Collects 9-1-1 computer-aided dispatch data for EMS response times.
• Allows longitudinal, internal benchmarking of key performance indicators.
• Provides multiple reporting features, including charts, graphs, and maps.

For more information, please visit mycares.net

Questions or Comments can be directed to:
Kimbra Shoop, Pennsylvania CARES Coordinator
kshoop@smemsc.org
570-473-7834