Department of Emergency Medicine

Community Impact

Section faculty lead emergency medical response planning and oversight for mass gathering events such as the Peachtree Road Race, the largest 10K in the world, and the Publix Atlanta Marathon. The Section also collaborates with the Atlanta Falcons for the provision of their Airway Management Physician services and with Medical Sports Group, for emergency medical response planning and other support for the Super Bowl. Section faculty collaborate with Grady EMS to lead the Emory-Grady EMS Biosafety Transport Team, which supports the CDC and the Emory University Hospital Serious Communicable Diseases Unit for the management and transport of patients with high consequence infectious diseases.

Teaching Mission

The Section’s teaching mission includes initial and continuing education for EMS professionals, through the Grady EMS Academy, the Atlanta Metropolitan College and the Emory EMS Advanced EMT program. The Section also hosts an ACGME accredited post-graduate fellowship in EMS, which provides training in emergency response systems and disaster preparedness to board prepared emergency medicine physicians. Section faculty are federally funded to disseminate education and training nationally for management of patients with high consequence infectious diseases. The Section faculty support the Department’s educational mission by hosting the EMS rotation for the Emory Emergency Medicine Residency Program and the Emory School of Medicine’s emergency medicine clerkship.

Scholarly Activities

The Section of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine has a long history of collaboration on scholarly initiatives. The Section collaborates with the Emory Center for Critical Care to evaluate strategies for early recognition of sepsis to facilitate timely intervention for patients who benefit from “early goal-directed therapy.” The PRESS (prehospital severe sepsis) project is co-led by Emory Center for Critical Care and Section of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine faculty. The Section supported the successful proposals for establishing the NIH funded Georgia StrokeNet and the Strategies to Innovate EmeRgENcy Care Clinical Trials Network (SIREN) contact hub in Atlanta. Section faculty have also contributed to the development of interactive risk stratification tools (SORT - Strategy for Off-Site Rapid Triage) adopted by the CDC, HHS, and Microsoft during the 2009 Pandemic.

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CARES

The Section of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine is also home to the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), which is a performance and quality improvement initiative that provides communities with data to compare patient populations, interventions, and outcomes related to sudden cardiac death. Since inception at Emory and implementation in Atlanta, the registry has grown to include 23 statewide registries and 63 additional communities in 18 states, representing a catchment area of more than 115 million people, 1400 EMS agencies and over 1900 hospitals. CARES has recorded over 400,000 cardiac arrest events in its registry.

Disaster

The Section is closely aligned with the Emory Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) which reports to university executive leadership and serves as the center for Emory enterprise-wide planning for and coordinated response to catastrophic events. CEPAR partners with the community to address all hazards, including natural disasters, human-caused catastrophic events, and public health emergencies.

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Prehospital and Disaster Medicine