New best practice approach to resuscitation competence and data management unveiled for hospitals

Combined offering from the American Heart Association and RQI Partners furthers mission to improve resuscitation practices and save more lives from in-hospital cardiac arrest

DALLAS, August 27, 2019—An integrated resuscitation product pairing combining the latest in resuscitation science, data management and quality improvement solutions is being offered by the American Heart Association, the leading voluntary health organization devoted to a world of longer, healthier lives, and RQI Partners, its partnership with Laerdal Medical.

The combination of the Association’s Get With The Guidelines^®-Resuscitation (GWTG-R) product suite and the Resuscitation Quality Improvement^® (RQI^®) program positions hospitals to cohesively refine resuscitation practices and data management to improve patient outcomes. Providing hospital leadership with an expanded and seamless assessment of CPR knowledge, skills, competence, analytics, data management and quality improvement helps prepare clinicians to confidently respond to cardiac arrest events.

“As a hospital system that wants to give every patient who experiences an in-hospital cardiac arrest the best chance of survival, leveraging both of these programs has increased our understanding of cardiac arrest events and improved the preparedness of our staff through frequent CPR practice,” said Michael Kurz, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and director of post-cardiac arrest service at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Better data management and a more robust learning platform, anchored in quality improvement and verified competence, help us improve practices and save more lives in the process.”

The Get With The Guidelines^®—Resuscitation program is designed to save more lives by preventing in-hospital cardiac arrest and optimizing outcomes through benchmarking data, quality improvement, knowledge translation and research. The program helps define staff knowledge and performance of resuscitation techniques and interventions, a key deficiency for many hospitals. The RQI program dovetails with this data to create a complete solution for quality improvement as well as a culture of resuscitation excellence through its low-dose, high-frequency skills assessment and real-time feedback on staff CPR competence and basic knowledge.

Now, hospitals can combine both programs in an integrated setting, with a customizable data set option within GWTG-R that streamlines and tracks critical data points.

“Connecting the Resuscitation Quality Improvement program, which verifies CPR competence, and the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines^® data management is a logical advancement in our mission to impact and improve in-hospital cardiac arrest outcomes and survival rates,” said John Meiners, chief of Mission-Aligned Businesses & Healthcare Solutions for the American Heart Association. “Working together allows hospital administrators and clinical staff to create a complete vision for resuscitation excellence and adherence to evidence-based standards of care.”

About Get With The Guidelines^®—Resuscitation

GWTG-R facilitates the efficient capture, analysis and reporting of data that empowers and supports the implementation of current guidelines, creation and dissemination of new knowledge, and development of next generation, evidence-based practice in resuscitation science.