Early Intervention Saves Lives Statistics is helping U.S. hospitals prove the value of innovative organizational changes to deal with medical crisis situations. At the Pittsburgh Medical Center, “SWAT...

Early Intervention Saves Lives Statistics is helping U.S. hospitals prove the value of innovative organizational changes to deal with medical crisis situations. At the Pittsburgh Medical Center, “SWAT teams” were shown to reduce patient mortality by cutting red tape for critically ill patients. They formed a Rapid Response Team (RRT) consisting of a critical care nurse, intensive care therapist, and a respiratory therapist, empowered to make decisions without waiting until the patient’s doctor could be paged. Statistics were collected on cardiac arrests for two months before and after the RRT concept was implemented. The sample data revealed more than a 50 percent reduction in total cardiac deaths and a decline in average ICU days after cardiac arrest from 163 days to only 33 days after RRT. These improvements were both statistically significant and of practical importance because of the medical benefits and the large cost savings in hospital care. Statistics played a similar role at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center in demonstrating the value of a new method of expediting treatment of heart attack emergency patients. (See The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2004, p. D1; and “How Statistics Can Save Failing Hearts,” The New York Times, March 7, 2007, p. C1.)