Publications by authors named "William Barnhardt"

Objective: This study sought to address the disagreement in literature regarding the "golden hour" in trauma by using the Relative Mortality Analysis to overcome previous studies' limitations in accounting for acuity when evaluating the impact of prehospital time on mortality.

Methods: The previous studies that failed to support the "golden hour" suffered from limitations in their efforts to account for the confounding effects of patient acuity on the relationship between prehospital time and mortality in their trauma populations. The Relative Mortality Analysis was designed to directly address these limitations using a novel acuity stratification approach, based on patients' probability of survival (PoS), a comprehensive triage metric calculated using Trauma and Injury Severity Score methodology.

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Measurement of trauma center performance presently relies on W-score calculation and comparison to national data sets. A limitation to this practice is a skewing of the W score, as it determines overall performance of a trauma population that is often heavily weighted by patients of low acuity. The University of Virginia relative mortality metric (RMM) was formulated to provide higher resolution in identifying areas of performance improvement within subpopulations of a trauma center using traditional Trauma Injury Severity Score methodology.

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