Injury Surveillance Resources

In order to better serve our members, the CSTE Injury Epidemiology and Surveillance Subcommittee has compiled resources for injury epidemiologists that may be helpful in conducting injury epidemiology. To suggest additions or revisions to this list, please contact Danielle Boyd.

Resources

External Cause-of-Injury Coding

The external cause of injury describes the vector that transfers the energy to the body (e.g., fall, motor vehicle traffic accident, or poisoning) and the intent of the injury (e.g., whether the injury was inflicted purposefully). External cause–of–injury codes, also known as E–codes, are the ICD codes used to classify injury incidents by mechanism of injury and intent.

Injury Indicators

Based on CSTE’s “Blueprint for a National Public Health Surveillance System for the 21st Century,” CSTE worked to create surveillance indicators for occupational health, environmental health, chronic disease, and injury prevention. The recommendations from the Injury Surveillance Workgroups (ISWs) were used to create these indicators. The indicators have evolved to include more states and additional indicators with the publication of each report.

Injury Surveillance Workgroup (ISW) Reports

Since 1999, CSTE has partnered with CDC and the State and Territorial Injury Prevention Director’s Association (now known as Safe States Alliance) on a series of workgroups addressing injury surveillance needs at state health departments.

Uniform Definitions and Data Elements for Surveillance

Uniform definitions and data elements are intended to promote and improve consistency of surveillance for public health practices. If recommended data elements can be uniformly recorded and the data made available to numerous users, then better estimates of the incidence and prevalence can be obtained and problems such as data incompatibility and high costs of collecting, linking, and using data can be substantially reduced.

  • Child Maltreatment Surveillance: Uniform Definitions for Public Health and Recommended Data Elements (2008) The purpose of the this report is to present a definition of child maltreatment, its associated terms, and recommended data elements to be used the public health community. The definitions and data elements are intended to promote and improve consistency of child maltreatment surveillance for public health practices and are designed to be flexible tools used in developing an ongoing surveillance system.
  • Intimate Partner Violence Surveillance: Uniform Definitions and Recommended Data Elements (2002) This report is intended for individuals and organizations interested in gathering surveillance data on intimate partner violence (IPV) to promote and improve consistency of IPV surveillance. If the recommended data elements can be uniformly recorded and the data made available to numerous users, then better estimates of the incidence and prevalence of IPV can be obtained and problems such as data incompatibility and high costs of collecting, linking, and using data can be substantially reduced.

Injury and Violence Surveillance Tools

Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools – Second Edition (2005) provides researchers and prevention specialists with a collection of tools to assess violence-related beliefs, behaviors, and influences and to evaluate programs to prevent youth violence. Most of the measures in this compendium are intended for use with youth ages 11-24 years. The compendium also contains scales and assessments for use with children ages 5-10 years to measure factors such as aggressive fantasies, beliefs supportive of aggression, attributional biases, prosocial behavior, and aggressive behavior.

  • Measuring Intimate Partner Violence Victimization and Perpetration: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (2006) provides researchers and prevention specialists with a set of tools measure victimization from and perpetration of intimate partner violence. This information is presented to help researchers and practitioners make informed decisions when choosing scales to use in their work.
  • Injury Surveillance Training Manual (2005) describes the steps needed to establish and maintain an injury surveillance system, provides information on designing and monitoring prevention activities, and offers guidance for making informed decisions about injury prevention. The curriculum emphasizes basic epidemiological skills needed to conduct surveillance and prevention activities, participation by different sectors and institutions in injury prevention efforts, and injury surveillance and prevention activities at the local level. The participant’s guide and other data files can be found at CDC’s website.
  • Overview of Injury Mortality Matrices are frameworks designed to organize ICD-coded injury data into meaningful groupings. The matrices were developed specifically to facilitate national and international comparability in the presentation of injury statistics. For a list of external cause-of-injury matrices and injury diagnosis matrices, click here.
  • Framework for Presenting Injury Mortality Data (1997) provides a framework for the uniform tabulation and analysis of injury mortality data classified by the Ninth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9).
  • Comparability of Cause of Death Between ICD–9 and ICD–10: Preliminary Estimates (2001) describes major features of the ICD-10 in classification and provides rules for comparison to ICD-9 classifications.
  • ICD-9-CM Barell Injury Diagnosis Matrix (2005) is a tool for classifying injury ICD-9-CM codes by body region and nature of injury.
  • Short Version of the International Classification of External Causes of Injury (ICECI) was designed to be an injury surveillance tool for coding valid and reliable external cause-of-injury data in many settings around the world that would cross-walk to the ICD system. In 2000, CDC piloted a shortened version of ICECI designed to be useful for routinely coding external cause-of-injury data from hospital emergency departments, which captures major mechanisms of injury, intent of injury, locale of the injury incident, activity at the time of the injury, work-relatedness, safety equipment use, consumer products involved, and a narrative describing the circumstances of the injury incident.

National Injury Data Systems

Cost of Injury

  • Cost of Injury in the United States: a Report to Congress (1989) is a landmark publication that articulates the need to address injury as a public health problem. The report identifies, for the first time, the magnitude of the economic effect of injury on the U.S. in statistical and human terms.
  • The Incidence and Economic Burden of Injury in the United States (2006) examines the lifetime time costs associated with the injuries that occur in just one year. The authors also examine medical expenses and productivity losses by gender, age, mechanism of injury, body region and body part injured, and severity.

Acknowledgement Statement:

This product was developed by the CSTE ICD-10-CM Transition Workgroup, the CSTE ICD-10-CM Drug Poisoning Indicators Workgroup, and CSTE consultants with subject matter support and review from CDC/NCIPC and CDC/NCHS. Product development was supported in part by CDC Cooperative Agreement Number NU38OT000297-01-00.

The findings and conclusions in this report are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC or HHS.