Improving national injury mortality data

Recent efforts to improve national injury mortality data have focused on data quality, analysis tools, and dissemination. This presentation will highlight work being done in each of these areas. For example, two federal initiatives to strengthen the forensic sciences may impact data quality. Each initiative has a component on medicolegal death investigation specifically addressing the needs of medical examiners and coroners, the professionals who determine the cause and manner of death for the majority of injury and poisoning deaths and are thus critical partners in improving the quality of information available. In terms of analysis tools, federal and state interest in mining the literal text on the death certificate has resulted in new tools to obtain more specific information than might be available from ICD-10 codes on the causes, substances, and objects involved in injury deaths. As an example, members of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists developed a program to analyze the literal text for drug overdose deaths which provides more detailed information on the specific drugs involved. This program could be adapted for use with other causes. To improve both analysis and dissemination capabilities, on-line systems to query multiple cause of death data are available. Additional efforts in the area of timely dissemination include a new publication for rapid reporting of national mortality data. These and other efforts to improve data quality, analysis, and dissemination will result in more timely and complete information on the causes and populations at risk for injury death.