Design and implementation of the hospital airway resuscitation trial

Abstract

Guidelines for the management of in-hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation are often drawn from evidence generated in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest populations and applied to the in-hospital setting. Approach to airway management during resuscitation is one example of this phenomenon, with the recommendation to place either a supraglottic airway or endotracheal tube when performing advanced airway management during in-hospital cardiac arrest based mainly in clinical trials conducted in the out-of-hospital setting. The Hospital Airway Resuscitation Trial (HART) is a pragmatic cluster-randomized superiority trial comparing a strategy of first choice supraglottic airway to a strategy of first choice endotracheal intubation during resuscitation from in-hospital cardiac arrest. The design includes a number of innovative elements such as a highly pragmatic design drawing from electronic health records and a novel primary outcome measure for cardiac arrest trials—alive-and-ventilator free days. Many of the topics explored in the design of HART have wide relevance to other trials in in-hospital cardiac arrest populations.