An Emory University registry that tracks out-of-hospital cardiac arrests nationwide is expanding into eight largely rural states thanks to new grant funding from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
Emory’s nationally distinguished Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) will use the three-year, $899,215 grant to improve cardiac arrest response and survivability in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The funding will bolster efforts to improve regional data sharing, coordination, and response efforts through the creation of a Midwestern Helmsley CARES Collaborative.
“Helmsley has made massive investments in improving cardiac care and survival in rural America,” said Walter Panzirer, Trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust. “The CARES registry will help us demonstrate the impact of these projects and guide future work.”
Cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among adults in the United States, yet survival chances increase dramatically when a nearby person can immediately call 911 and begin CPR. Survival rates vary greatly from community to community, and EMS data can be difficult to acquire in rural areas where limited resources make data collection a low priority.
The CARES performance and quality improvement program, which is led by Executive Director Bryan McNally, MD, and his staff of 11 from Emory’s Atlanta campus, equips communities with crucial data to compare patient populations, interventions, and outcomes related to sudden cardiac arrest. The registry is the only national data collection tool that connects pre-hospital arrest data with hospital outcomes.
“The data we collect through CARES allows communities to track when and where out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur and measure local response with the goal of increasing survival rates,” said McNally. “We are beyond grateful to the Helmsley Charitable Trust and all our partners for their support as we work to help these regions understand how to improve and create interventions.”
Founded by Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2004, CARES serves as a multicenter registry of people who have had nontraumatic, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the United States. The registry covers an area of more than 175 million people or approximately 53 percent of the U.S. population, representing 30 participating states and the District of Columbia.
To date, CARES has captured more than 1 million cardiac arrest events, with more than 2,300 EMS agencies and over 2,500 hospitals participating nationwide. Additionally, investigating disparities in care is a cornerstone of the team’s work.
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust began its grantmaking operations in 2008 and aspires to improve lives by supporting exceptional efforts in the U.S. and around the world in health and select place-based initiatives. Helmsley’s Rural Healthcare Program funds innovative projects that use information technologies to connect rural patients to emergency medical care, bring the latest medical therapies to patients in remote areas, and provide state-of-the-art training for rural hospitals and EMS personnel.
For this new venture, the CARES team will partner with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Resuscitation Medicine (CRM) to create the eight-state Midwestern Helmsley CARES Collaborative. The American Red Cross, one of CARES’ major partners for the last decade, will provide administrative and technical support as the registry expands into four new states — Iowa, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming. All states will be able to use the information gathered through these partnerships to improve cardiac systems of care.
“They’re hoping that this may serve as a template that will be easy to replicate in other rural areas,” McNally said. “This is a great example of how to work with multiple states in a region to do improvement activities,” he added.
To date, Helmsley Charitable Trust has awarded more than $600 million to organizations and initiatives in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.