PECARN most often refers to the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network, and secondarily to its widely used pediatric head trauma decision rules for CT use in the ED.
PECARN is the first federally funded multi-institutional research network in pediatric emergency medicine in the U.S., created to study prevention and management of acute illness and injury in children and adolescents across emergency care settings.
The network collectively caring for well over a million acutely ill or injured children annually.
PECARN developed validated clinical prediction rules to identify children at very low risk of clinically important traumatic brain injury (ciTBI) after blunt head trauma, helping clinicians decide when CT is not needed, when it is recommended, and when observation vs CT is appropriat
Implementation of PECARN head trauma rules into ED workflow and EHR decision support has been shown to significantly reduce cranial CT utilization in children without increasing missed ciTBI, thereby decreasing radiation exposure and costs.
PECARN conducts multicenter studies on topics such as pediatric sepsis prediction, medication errors in the ED, disparities in pediatric emergency care quality, RNA-based diagnostics to distinguish bacterial vs non‑bacterial infections in febrile infants, and EMS data integration for pediatric patients.
These studies aim to improve equity, safety, and outcomes in pediatric emergency care by building registries, prediction models, and infrastructures for translational and health services research.