CARES overview
The Section of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed and maintains the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES). Through the CARES program, we are developing a national registry system to track when and where a cardiac arrest occurs and how well the local EMS system dealt with the cases, with the goal of increasing cardiac arrest survival rates.
Sudden cardiac arrest results from an abrupt loss of heart function and is the leading cause of death among adults in the United States. Its onset is unexpected, and death occurs minutes after symptoms develop (AHA, 2005). Survival rates are low but vary as much as 10-fold across communities. Victims' chances of survival increase with early activation of 9-1-1 and prompt handling of the call, early provision of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and rapid defibrillation, and early access to definitive care. CARES is designed to allow communities to measure each link in their "chain of survival" quickly and easily and use this information to save more lives.
CARES is a performance and quality improvement program 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.