Center for the Evaluation of Emergency Medical Services (CEEMS)

Past CEEMS activities

Medical Student Projects: CEEMS sponsors students each year who are completing a medical school graduation requirement to conduct a research project. Each student is assigned a faculty and staff mentor who helps the student design the project and develop the methodology. Providing the unique experience of learning EMS research. The most successful of projects are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This allows for the opportunity look at our EMS data in new and exciting ways.

• Heart Rescue Project: This project aims to improve survival from sudden cardiac arrest throughout King County and Washington State by establishing a state-wide standardized set of information to collect and report cardiac arrest data and use that information to implement programs aimed at improving care and treatment of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
  
  
• Program to Integrate Technology and Cardiac Arrest Resuscitation – A Life Sciences Discovery Fund Award: This grant aims to advance technologies and the science of resuscitation to improve outcomes from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). The program is a collection of interrelated projects directed at strengthening the links in the chain of survival: early activation of 9-1-1, increased bystander CPR, public access to early defibrillation, high performance CPR, delivery of BLS and ALS services, and post-resuscitation care.
  
  
• Resuscitation Academy: The Resuscitation Academy, a partnership between King County EMS and Seattle Medic One, focuses on strategies to improve cardiac arrest survival rates. It is designed to help EMS managers and directors improve cardiac arrest survival in their communities. Participants will be given the knowledge and essential tools to return to their communities and develop a concrete plan of action to improve survival.
  
  
• Simulation training to improve 911 dispatcher identification of cardiac arrest: Emergency medical services call takers are trained to provide CPR instructions to bystanders over the phone while waiting for EMS responders to arrive. Dispatcher-assisted CPR (DA-CPR) has been shown to significantly increase a patient's chances of survival from cardiac arrest. However, approximately 30% of cardiac arrest cases did not receive DA-CPR, and thus opportunities to perform CPR may be missed. Given the current low survival rates for cardiac arrest in most communities, increasing DA-CPR could have an enormous impact nationwide. Funded by the Agency for Health Care Research & Quality (AHRQ), this 3 year grant will implement a 9-1-1 call simulation training to test the hypothesis that experience with mock calls coupled with feedback will improve the ability of call receivers to identify cases in cardiac arrest at the time of the call.
  
  
• Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN): Funded by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), this pilot project investigates the potential use of telematics data for beneficial crash injury research. Partnering with 6 other national sites, the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) project consists of two phases. The potential benefits of this pilot include reducing response times to accident scene, efficient use of emergency services resources, and higher survival rates from vehicular crashes. If phase 1 is deemed successful, phase 2 will focus on large scale implementation.