Practitioners Assess Achievements and Challenges of Nonfatal Injury Surveillance

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Epidemiology
• Health Informatics

Background:

• Injury surveillance data is primarily coded for administrative purposes, not epidemiological accuracy.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched the Surveillance Quality Improvement (SQI) initiative to enhance injury data methodology.
• Evaluating the accuracy of ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM coding for injury surveillance was a key focus of the SQI initiative.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify the achievements and challenges of the CDC's SQI initiative.
• To gather insights from experienced injury epidemiology practitioners involved in the SQI initiative.

Main Methods:

• Conducted semistructured interviews with 12 state and federal public health agency representatives.
• Transcribed and coded interview data using NVivo qualitative analysis software.
• Employed both in vivo coding and a priori theme coding for data analysis.

Main Results:

• Identified two overarching themes: variability among states and observations on injury surveillance science.
• Gained insights into medical record access, case definition validation, and medical coding variations.
• Explored the potential use of medical record review data in other injury-related research areas.

Conclusions:

• The SQI initiative provided valuable insights for International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) case definitions in national injury surveillance.
• Ongoing reliance on administrative datasets presents persistent challenges in data access and quality for injury surveillance.
• Further improvements are needed to enhance the epidemiological accuracy of injury surveillance data.