Using Quality Improvement to Promote Clinical Trials of Emergency Trauma Therapies

Injury is the leading cause of death in the United States for patients younger than 45 years. A recent study involving 1706 patients undergoing emergency laparotomy following trauma from 2012 to 2013 revealed that, despite perceived improvements in care of an injured patient, mortality for the most severely injured subgroup—those with an arrival blood pressure less than 90 mm Hg—has been unchanged over the past 2 decades.¹ One of many reasons for this lack of improvement in mortality is the limited amount of high-quality research on acute trauma.²