(Outstanding Innovative Project)

PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
Although highway safety increasingly is being recognized as a public health issue, the State of Iowa was not able to link traffic crash data with the vast amount of health data produced by hospitals and other medical care facilities. This prevented the state from creating a comprehensive picture of the cause, treatment and outcome of injuries related to traffic crashes. If it were possible to link existing data on the crash and the driver with medical data on the injuries sustained and the outcome of these injuries, Iowa would be better able to provide a comprehensive evaluation of motor vehicle-related deaths and injuries.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
The overall goal of this project was to establish a mechanism for the reporting of motor vehicle crashes and linking these data to medical data related to all injuries.

STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
The Iowa Trauma Registry was initiated through the participation of 10 hospitals in the state that have an internal trauma registry. These hospitals collected injury data but did not submit these data to any statewide agency. The first step in moving toward a statewide registry was the establishment of a Hospital Trauma Coordinator User Group which met monthly to discuss such issues as data elements, data definitions and report formats. Once this group had reached agreement on these topics, a trauma registry software package was developed for the aggregate collection and analysis of hospital trauma registry data by the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH). The IDPH then provided training for the participating hospital trauma coordinators on the use of the software. After the data began flowing to IDPH, it was then possible to link the injuries cases reported by the hospital to the traffic crash data reported by the local police.

RESULTS
In the initial project period, the 10 participating hospitals reported data on a select group of patients, involving 4,224 unintentional injuries. Thirty-eight percent of these injuries (1,592) were related to an automobile crash. Automobile crashes accounted for $16.4 million in hospital charges, or 46 percent of the more than $36.7 million in injury-related hospital costs.

During the project, the software was modified to allow for the collection of additional data that was required by the Head and Spinal Registry. This streamlined the data reporting requirements for hospitals that participate in the Registry in the future.

The future goals for this program are to expand the participation in the Registry to all 120 Iowa hospitals, and to complete the link with traffic record data maintained by the Iowa Department of Transportation.

FALL 1998