dr-exmedic.com

In an editorial in the August Annals, Mickey Eisenberg and Roger White note that in 40+ years of research on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, “fewer than 50 communities” have reported survival rates.  This begs the question:  how many EMS agencies know how well they’re doing?  After all, the only way to get better at something is to know how well you’re currently doing it.

However, this also gets into some thorny issues:  are services not collecting any data?  The wrong data?  Are people suppressing data that they collect?

I will admit that collecting the right information isn’t always easy.  The most important statistic is survival to good neurologic outcome, not just survival to hospital–but it’s the latter stat that is far easier for EMS agencies to calculate.  As much as I am not a huge fan of the privacy implications of a personalized medical record that is transportable between health care facilities, I do admit that such a system would make a lot of this data collection much easier.