John A. Stewart RN, MA
Seattle, Washington
National Registry
of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation
Here is the description from the American Heart Association's ECC site:
Experts in emergency medicine and cardiology developed the NRCPR, sponsored by the American Heart Association, to collect data from in-hospital resuscitation events. The PC-based system follows to the Utstein-style guidelines for reporting hospital resuscitation. Tri-Analytics, Inc., administers the new registry.
Here is the description from the Tri-Analytics site, to which the above link will take you:
The AHA’s National Registry of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation has been developed by experts in emergency medicine and cardiology to collect data about in-hospital resuscitation events. The registry is administered by Tri-Analytics, a company with extensive experience in managing national registries.
The registry’s goal is to provide a centralized, efficient, consistent means for collecting and analyzing data on in-hospital resuscitations. By better understanding these occurrences, we can evaluate equipment and training, improve practices and ultimately save lives.
The PC-based reporting instrument is based on the Utstein-style guidelines for reporting hospital resuscitation. Using this standard format makes it easy to collect consistent, relevant data from medical records, and monitor performance internally and make external comparisons.
This registry certainly has the potential to provide much-needed aggregate data from in-hospital resuscitation attempts. For a fee of $1200 per year per facility, the facility gets to use their software for data entry and gets quarterly reports summarizing facility performance and comparing it to other facilities in the database.
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Sudden Cardiac
Arrest Association
The Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association (formerly National Center for Early Defibrillation) is "an organization singularly focused on sudden cardiac arrest. SCAA identifies and unites survivors, those at risk of sudden cardiac arrest, as well as others who are interested in being advocates on SCAA issues in their communities and beyond. Our membership is dedicated to promoting solutions to prevent sudden cardiac death, including increased awareness, immediate bystander action, public access to defibrillation (PAD) and access to therapies(principally ICDS--implantable cardiac defibrillators)."
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A Web site for instruction and information on "basic" CPR (i.e., mouth-to-mouth ventilation and chest compressions). This is the best I've seen of several on the Web. I'm ambivalent about putting this link on my site, since defibrillation, not "basic" CPR, should be the first priority for in-hospital cardiac arrests (for a more complete discussion, click here). However, the skill is important for out-of hospital arrests. The existence of such sites brings up the question, why hasn't the American Heart Association done something similar? All you get at their ECC Web site is information on where to buy printed texts. If universal CPR training is the goal, providing free information on the Web seems like an obvious step.Use your browser's BACK button to return to this page.
A commercial site which promotes a bedside automatic external defibrillator, designed for continuous monitoring of at-risk hospitalized patients with completely automatic shock delivery. Their device received FDA approval for in-hospital use in October 1997. In August of 1999, Cardiac Science received clearance from the FDA to integrate its cardiac arrest detection and defibrillation software into bedside monitor-defibrillator platforms. They have just begun to market their main product, the PowerHeart, in the US. Disclosure statement: I have received travel expenses and an honorarium for a one-day visit to Cardiac Science, Inc., and they provide Web hosting services for this site.
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