The California Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (CAL-ROC): A novel collaboration to facilitate the implementation of randomized clinical trials in the prehospital setting

Abstract

Background

Few large randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have been conducted to inform the prehospital phase of care for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). We describe the development of a consortium to facilitate large-scale prehospital RCTs through a novel research collaboration, leveraging pre-existing prehospital and hospital data capture infrastructure.

Consortium description

We developed a consortium consisting of 173 emergency medical services (EMS) Provider Agencies and four academic “hubs.” The consortium is an innovative collaboration consisting of a diverse set of EMS experts from across California and designed to overcome logistical, cost, and regulatory challenges associated with prehospital research. All participating agencies share data via a state EMS database, California EMS Information System (CEMSIS), and contribute data to the national Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) database. Data from CEMSIS and CARES will be linked to capture RCT outcomes. We abstracted two years of data from the CARES database to characterize the population served by the consortium and facilitate sample size calculations for future trials. We estimate that the consortium will have the ability to enroll a diverse population of patients with OHCA, at a rate of approximately 19,000 per year across all sites, for a future trial of cardiac arrest therapies.

Conclusion

This collaboration uses pre-existing data infrastructure to capture prehospital and hospital outcome data to facilitate large-scale prehospital RCTs for time-critical emergencies.