Characteristics of Rapid Response Calls in the United States: An Analysis of the First 402,023 Adult Cases From the Get With the Guidelines Resuscitation-Medical Emergency Team Registry

Objectives: To characterize the rapid response team activations, and the patients receiving them, in the American Heart Association-sponsored Get With The Guidelines Resuscitation-Medical Emergency Team cohort between 2005 and 2015. Design: Retrospective multicenter cohort study. Setting: Three hundred sixty U.S. hospitals. Patients: Consecutive adult patients experiencing rapid response team activation. Interventions: Rapid response team activation. Measurements and Main Results: The cohort included 402,023 rapid response team activations from 347,401 unique healthcare encounters. Respiratory triggers (38.0%) and cardiac triggers (37.4%) were most common. The most frequent interventions—pulse oximetry (66.5%), other monitoring (59.6%), and supplemental oxygen (62.0%)—were noninvasive. Fluids were the most common medication ordered (19.3%), but new antibiotic orders were rare (1.2%). More than 10% of rapid response teams resulted in code status changes. Hospital mortality was over 14% and increased with subsequent rapid response activations. Conclusions: Although patients requiring rapid response team activation have high inpatient mortality, most rapid response team activations involve relatively few interventions, which may limit these teams’ ability to improve patient outcomes.