Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival

The Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival or CARES was initiated in 2004 as an agreement between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory University. It is a simple but powerful database that allows cities to collect a small set of performance measures from 9-1-1, first responders, fire departments, and Emergency Medical Services, and link it with outcome data from hospitals. This data enables cities to perform internal benchmarking and improve their response to cardiac arrest by strengthening the chain of survival in their community. Because most EMS systems don't measure their response effectively, they are unable to implement change in an effective manner. Since the program's inception, survival from cardiac arrest in the city of Atlanta has increased from 3% to 15%. For the last half of 2007, survival in Atlanta increased to 31.2%.