ResCU II: Improving In-hospital Cardiac Arrest Care and Discovering Keys to Super-Survivorship

NIH RePORTER · VA · I01 · · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

Project Background: Since at least VHA Directive 2008-063, improving in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) care has been an important VA priority. This focus was renewed after the Office of the Inspector General report on IHCA in 2013 (13-00054-148), and repeated again in 2015 with the formation of VHA Resuscitation Quality Improvement Committee (RQI-C) by Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Health for Clinical Operations. At the individual level, vast amounts of VA clinician time are devoted to having every clinician recertify their Basic or Advanced Cardiac Life Support training every two years to improve the care of IHCA. Our previous ResCU-1 project identified critical gaps in VA care of IHCA: (1) documentation of key IHCA factors that help systems drive quality improvement, and clinicians determine prognosis and treatment after IHCA were often unavailable; (2) 1/3rd to 2/3rd of VA hospitals underutilized other best practices in IHCA care, e.g. mock codes and post-IHCA debriefing. Yet, ResCU-1 also found (3) some Veterans had remarkable recovery from IHCA, becoming “super-survivors”—but we do not know how the care of super-survivors differed. Specific Aims: Building on ResCU-1's foundations and in partnership with the VA Resuscitation Education Initiative (REdI), we will: A1. Assess implementation of a new documentation template as a model for quality efforts. A2. Develop & pilot new interventions to improve IHCA care, focusing on post-code debriefing, mock code simulation training, and code documentation. A3. Identify IHCA super-survivors & `best practices' associated with their care. Project Methods: Aim 1 will be accomplished by retrospective review of all IHCA hospitalizations' electronic medical records, research-assistant annotation of those records, and multi-level statistical modeling. Aim 2 will use video-site-visits to identify barriers and facilitators using established frameworks (CFIR and TDF), and then partner to pilot and implement interventions (likely beginning with virtual learning collaborative) to improve documentation, mock codes, and post-IHCA debriefing. Aim 3 will do deep semi- structured interviews with super-survivors, their informal caregivers and control patients of similar disability who did not recover after IHCA, and their VA clinicians to identify candidate practices that may contribute to super-survivorship. The association of those practices with super-survivorship will then be tested in a prospective cohort of IHCA survivors. All will be integrated to produce and disseminate with partners a `Code Blue Survivor Bundle' to form the basis of further improvements in VA care of IHCA. Anticipated Impact on Veteran's Healthcare: An in-hospital cardiac arrest occurs when a patient's heart stops beating effectively, either due to electrical or muscular problems. IHCA is a medical emergency; VA devotes great resources to responding to IHCAs. In VA HSR&D's ResCU-1 study, we discovered that important improvements can be mad...

Key facts

NIH application ID
9796058
Project number
5I01HX002390-02
Recipient
VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION
Principal Investigator
Theodore J Iwashyna
Activity code
I01
Funding institute
VA
Fiscal year
2021
Award amount
Award type
5
Project period
2018-10-01 → 2022-03-31