Lizette Villarreal, NTI project manager, and Dr. Brian Eastridge, MIMIC principal investigator, present the MIMIC study at MHSRS this month.
The MIMIC study was funded through a $4 million Department of Defense grant to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the epidemiology of civilian prehospital injury deaths and their potential for survivability. Through a review of some 3,000 prehospital deaths in six diverse states—which is, at present, about a third of the way complete—the study aims to determine survivability by mechanism of injury as well as appropriateness of EMS response and care delivered.
Utilizing the clinical and forensic judgement of national experts serving as MIMIC team panel reviewers, this study will serve to advance prehospital care and trauma systems development. This, in turn, will be translatable into military medicine and the protection and care of the Wounded Warrior.
The research specifically answers a civilian trauma system deficit identified in the 2016 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report entitled “A National Trauma Care System: Integrating Military and Civilian Trauma Systems to Achieve Zero Preventable Deaths after Injury.” This work noted several specific trauma system gaps requiring remediation, including incomplete or entirely missing linkages among prehospital care, hospital-based acute care, rehabilitation, and the medical examiner. The NASEM report also highlighted that “a critical but often neglected source of data—particularly in civilian systems—is autopsy reports on trauma deaths, which could be used to determine the preventability of fatalities based on a common, accepted lexicon.”
The U. S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity, 820 Chandler Street, Fort Detrick MD 21702-5014 is the awarding and administering acquisition office. This work was supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, through the Defense Medical Research and Development Program under Award No. W81XWH-17-2-0010. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense.
-by Pam Bixby, Pam@NatTrauma.org