Comparative Effectiveness of Prehospital and Hospital Emergency Care

CSHP is creating a data infrastructure for comparative effectiveness research (CER) that bridges prehospital and hospital care using newly available electronic patient care records for prehospital EMS transports in New Jersey. These data will be linked to all-payer hospital discharge abstract data and death certificates to support a wide range of CER studies on patient-and system-level interventions where prehospital and hospital services are tightly connected. The Center is also applying the data infrastructure to a CER study of therapeutic hypothermia (TH) for initial survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). This project is innovative in creating one of the largest linked prehospital/hospital data sets in the U.S. and in conducting one of the first large-scale CER studies of TH. The linked database will enable a much wider scope of research and surveillance than is currently possible with narrowly defined trauma and cardiac event registries. Future potential uses of the database include development of evidence-based practice guidelines, assessment of guideline compliance, and the development and testing of EMS interventions for special populations such as frequent 9-1-1 callers.