Title full: Recommended guidelines for monitoring, reporting, and conducting research on medical emergency team, outreach, and rapid response systems: An Utstein-style scientific statement. A Scientific Statement from the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation; the American Heart Association Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee; the Council on Cardiopulmonary, Perioperative, and Critical Care; and the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research. The number of core data elements may be challenging, but every effort has been made to minimise demands on clinicians, quality-improvement staff, and researchers. Where data elements require retrospective review of patient records, careful consideration of the cost-benefit of these data elements was made, and in every case, the additional benefit was thought to outweigh the costs of data collection. We urge clinicians to make every effort to include these data elements in their internal quality-improvement programs, and we urge researchers to include them in their research design. The level of monitoring of patients in hospitals may increase significantly in the future, and it is possible that many more patients will be monitored continuously rather than intermittently. These changes may affect the activation criteria used and resources required to staff response teams adequately. Increased surveillance may increase the number of response team calls. Optimal methods for monitoring hospitalised patients are not well understood, but the information collected as part of the investigation of these response teams may also contribute to more appropriate monitoring strategies. The purpose of MET, RRT, and CCOT systems is to improve quality of care and prevent adverse outcomes in hospitalised patients. In particular, the prevention of medical error is a high priority.54,55 Systems such as these are needed to ensure that gaps in quality of care are closed.