Prognostication

Prognostication focuses on differentiating patients with recoverable illness and brain injury after cardiac arrest from those with irrecoverable injury.  Prognostication after cardiac arrest is challenging and we have shown that premature withdrawal of life-sustaining therapies for perceived poor neurological prognosis contributes to avoidable deaths.  Members of the Post-Cardiac Arrest Service have authored consensus guidelines and scientific statements describing an evidence-based approach and best practices with regard to outcome prediction after cardiac arrest. We developed and validated the Pittsburgh Cardiac Arrest Category risk stratification tool and demonstrated its usefulness to guide early resuscitative intervention.  We have applied and created cutting edge analytical approaches model real-world sequential acquisition of prognostic data, transform continuous waveform data into precise prognostic estimates and identify evidence of self-fulfilling prophecies in observational datasets. We work to understand the quality of prognostication in real-world practice and elucidate how doctors predict outcomes to identify approaches to improve their performance.