The following are 10 points to remember about the American Heart Association (AHA) response to the 2015 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on Strategies to Improve Cardiac Arrest Survival:

1. The American Heart Association (AHA) supports the recently released Institute of Medicine (IOM) report entitled “Strategies to Improve Cardiac Arrest Survival: A Time to Act (2015).”
2. The report highlights the public health burden of cardiac arrest and makes important recommendations regarding how the country should move forward.
3. The AHA recognizes the unique opportunity created by the report to meaningfully advance the objectives of improving outcomes for sudden cardiac arrest. The AHA is committed to continuing its decade’s long leadership in improving cardiac arrest outcomes, but also acknowledges that they cannot do it alone.
4. The AHA will provide up to $5 million in funding over 5 years to incentivize resuscitation data interoperability.
5. The AHA will actively pursue philanthropic support for local and regional implementation opportunities to increase cardiac arrest survival by improving out-of-hospital and in-hospital systems of care.
6. The AHA will actively pursue philanthropic support to launch an AHA resuscitation research network.
7. The AHA will cosponsor a “National Cardiac Arrest Summit” to facilitate the creation of a national cardiac arrest collaborative that will unify the field and identify common goals to improve survival. This is in addition to AHA’s historic and ongoing commitment to improving cardiac arrest care and outcomes.
8. Successful implementation of the IOM recommendations will require a timely response by all stakeholders identified in the report, and a coordinated approach to achieve our common goal of improved cardiac arrest outcomes.
9. Local health departments should engage with community and neighborhood organizations and service providers to expand the types and locations of available cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillator (AED) training to populations over age 65 and caregivers for this population.
10. The AHA supports strengthening laboratory, clinical, and translational resuscitation research support to levels commensurate with the public health burden of cardiac arrest for adult and pediatric populations across federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.

Keywords: Acute Coronary Syndrome, Arrhythmias, Cardiac, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Death, Sudden, Cardiac, Defibrillators, Heart Arrest, Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest, Resuscitation, Survival

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