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.