Phoenix Children's Boosts Post-Cardiac Arrest Health with Dashboard

Why It Matters

Standardizing post‑cardiac arrest care reduces preventable deaths and neurological injury, setting a replicable model for high‑acuity pediatric units nationwide.

Key Takeaways

• Dashboard applied to 279 pediatric arrest cases (2021‑2025).
• Mortality fell nearly 10% after dashboard implementation.
• Targeted temperature management use rose from 40% to >90%.
• Post‑arrest fever incidence dropped from 12% to 2%.
• EEG, ECHO, and brain‑oxygen monitoring increased, enabling earlier interventions.

Pulse Analysis

Pediatric cardiac arrest remains one of the most lethal emergencies in intensive care, yet evidence‑based guidelines exist for temperature control, hemodynamic optimization, and neurologic monitoring. In practice, busy ICU teams often struggle to align on these priorities, leading to missed interventions that can worsen outcomes. Phoenix Children’s recognized this gap and leveraged its informatics expertise to create a unified, data‑driven safety net that surfaces critical tasks the moment a child arrives in the PICU or CVICU after arrest.

The resulting dashboard pulls data from more than a dozen electronic health‑record sources and generates a daily email alert that highlights each patient’s status against six key metrics: targeted temperature management, fever prevention, EEG monitoring, cerebral and somatic oximetry, echocardiography, and blood pressure targets. By automating the “identify‑review‑communicate” loop, the system eliminates manual chart reviews and ensures that the care team can act on outliers during the morning huddle. This closed‑loop workflow not only standardizes care but also cultivates a shared mental model among physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists, reducing variability during high‑stress periods.

Since its rollout, the dashboard has been applied to 279 children, delivering a near‑10% reduction in mortality and boosting temperature‑control device usage from 40% to over 90%. Fever rates fell from 12% to 2%, and utilization of EEG, cardiac imaging, and brain‑oxygen monitoring rose, enabling earlier detection of secondary injuries. These outcomes illustrate how real‑time analytics can translate clinical guidelines into consistent actions, offering a blueprint for other pediatric and adult critical‑care programs seeking to improve survivorship and neurologic outcomes through technology‑enabled care pathways.