Western Emergency Services Translational Research Network

The Western Emergency Services Translational Research Network (WESTRN) is a consortium of emergency medicine researchers at sites with Clinical Translational Science Awards (CTSA) in the western United States. The consortium's objective is to conduct high quality multicenter research focused on important emergency medicine issues. Current and Past Projects (chronological order) 1. Prehospital Trauma Study: The study objective is to evaluate the current prehospital trauma triage guidelines and potentially develop new guidelines that better match patient clinical and resource needs with hospital resource available. Cost implications and cost effectiveness of different approaches to field triage will also be evaluated. The initial field triage study in WESTRN was retrospective, and was followed by a prospective cohort study (in progress). 2. Variability in Intensive Care Unit Utilization in Patients with Blunt Head Trauma: Patients with minor traumatic intracranial hemorrhage are frequently admitted to the intensive care unit, although many never require critical care interventions. We will describe critical care resource utilization in minor traumatic intracranial hemorrhage by the following objectives: 1) evaluating the variability of ICU utilization in a cohort of patients with minor traumatic brain hemorrhage across multiple trauma centers and 2) the proportion of adult patients with traumatic brain hemorrhage admitted to the intensive care unit who never receive a critical care intervention during hospitalization. 3. Validation of the Denver Trauma Organ Failure Score: The Denver Trauma Organ Failure Score was derived to identify trauma patients in the emergency department are at risk for multi-organ failure. This prospective study will enroll over 2,000 patients at 3 sites (Denver Health, UC Davis and OHSU) to validate the prior scoring system.