PAROS FAQ
Participation in PAROS requires a liaison person at each participating site or EMS agency to serve as the local PAROS administrator, and to assist in communications between the participating site/agency, country representative(s) and PAROS CRN personnel.
The liaison person will work closely with PAROS CRN personnel to:
(i) determine the most appropriate methods for starting data collection and program implementation, and
(ii) monitor data collection for the EMS agencies and participating hospitals.
There are two main methods of contributing data to PAROS CRN:
(i) Direct entry online via the online data capture system (https://eparos.org/);
(ii) Export field entry which uses exported data from participating sites to auto-populate the PAROS registry.
Yes. We use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology in transmitting patient health information to ensure integrity and privacy. The entire system is protected by cutting edge fire protection, and off-site data archiving to assure data integrity, even in the event of a catastrophe.
The patient’s name and/or a unique identification number are used to match the EMS record with hospital outcomes. Once the record is determined to be complete by PAROS CRN personnel, unique identifiers will be removed to de-identify the record.
A participating site (whether EMS agency or hospital) would have access to all the data contributed by that site. Personnel at that site would not have access to data from other participating site(s). PAROS CRN personnel would have access to data from all sites for monitoring and de-identification purposes.
The PAROS Online Data Capture System uses an electronic CRF which is in English. However, many of the data systems participating in PAROS CRN are in their native languages (Japanese, Korean, Chinese etc). For the International Study on Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest, we will adopt a common taxonomy jointly developed with the participating countries and all participating sites will align their data variables to this common taxonomy. Pre-agreed data fields collected at the sites will then be assigned a number (i.e, coded) and matched against the common taxonomy. This allows data in the various languages to be translated into numbers as the medium for data to be imported into PAROS. Accurate translation of data fields from other languages to English would be crucial to ensure accurate mapping of the data.
We usually extract our study data manually from the EMR of any hospital. The data can be downloaded and imported into our database, or physically entered by our site coordinators.
Although the key hospitals in PAROS CRN tend to be tertiary hospitals, the Network also involves community hospitals.
PAROS CRN is a network that is EMS-based (using ambulance catchment areas), and it also includes the hospitals supporting these catchment areas. Since we collect data from both EMS agencies and hospitals, data captured by PAROS CRN is a population-based and would be representative of the population.
No, we currently do not conduct genetic/genomic studies.
Yes, it is possible to select only certain sites to conduct studies, depending on the focus.
PAROS CRN focuses on acute conditions requiring ambulance and emergency care (cardiac arrest, trauma, heart attack, stroke, breathing difficulty, asthma, etc). The strength of the Network lies in the ability to get data from ambulance and emergency departments / hospitals.
We are happy to discuss the possibility of any research collaboration related to Pre-hospital and Emergency Care.