Published in: Annals of Emergency Medicine, v. 56, no. 5, Nov. 2010, p. 568-570
Posted on RAND.org on January 01, 2010
Emergency care research can help save lives. Critical areas for such work include: studies to elucidate the timing, sequence, and duration of causal molecular and cellular events involved in time-critical illnesses and injuries, and the development of treatments capable of halting or reversing them ; the discovery, translation, and application of biomedical discoveries to enhance early diagnosis and characterization of life-threatening conditions ; clinical studies to evaluate promising treatments and especially bundles of treatments to manage the most critically ill and injured patients, including those whose underlying disease process may be ill defined at the outset ; and the optimal design of systems (information processing, care management, environmental design, materials and methods) to improve care and enhance patient safety.