Database Designed to Drive Improvements in Pulmonary Embolism Care
In a CDC-sponsored presentation about pulmonary embolism response teams (PERT) on March 11, Rachel Rosovsky, MD, MPH, vice president of the PERT Consortium, acknowledged most of the data supporting the PERT concept come from single-center reports that lack prospective, controlled studies to evaluate the benefits.1
However, she noted PERTs are so prevalent today that it is doubtful researchers could conduct a randomized, clinical trial.
To surmount this hurdle, Rosovsky said the PERT Consortium is endeavoring to bring everyone’s data together in one multicenter registry called the PERT Consortium Quality Database.2
“In just over two years, we have [collected data] on thousands of new patients from 33 sites across the United States,” Rosovsky reported. “This is not a database of all PEs in your institutions. It is a database for whom the PERT ... was activated. These are really the sicker patients, and the patients for whom there is not really a clear-cut answer for how to treat them.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, 54% of the PEs represented in the database thus far are categorized as intermediate risk, with 12% at intermediate-high and 12% at intermediate-low. She also noted that just over 50% of patients were started on anticoagulation therapy before PERT activation, a statistic that underscores an opportunity for improvement, considering the importance of early anticoagulation in cases of PE.
“The power of the database is to positively incentivize people to work together and improve outcomes,” Rosovsky said. “This may be the largest modern database in the world reporting outcomes just with PE alone.”
REFERENCES
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Multidisciplinary care for acute pulmonary embolism: The pulmonary embolism response team. March 11, 2021.
- PERT Consortium. The PERT Consortium Quality Database.
Most of data supporting the pulmonary embolism response team (PERT) concept comes from single-center reports that lack prospective, controlled studies to evaluate the benefits. PERTs are so prevalent today that it is doubtful researchers could conduct a randomized, clinical trial. To surmount this hurdle, researchers are endeavoring to bring everyone’s data together in one multicenter registry called the PERT Consortium Quality Database.
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