Occupational injury surveillance: An evaluation of the usefulness of Minnesota hospital discharge data systems

Background: State health agencies rely on occupational injury surveillance to assess specific needs for occupational injury prevention programs and policies and to monitor their effectiveness. To monitor nonfatal occupational injuries, one common and important source is hospital discharge data and this method was used in our study.

Methods: Criteria for identifying occupational injuries in hospital data were developed from the Minnesota Hospital Association uniform hospital discharge data system to form a case definition which included one or more of the following codes: payer identification was workers comp; place of occurrence was a farm, mine and quarry, industrial place and premises; condition code was "employment-related"; occurrence code was "accident, employment-related"; or observation was done following accident at work.

Results: Preliminary analysis from a sample of 100 revealed that the operational definition used for work-related injury was sufficient for gathering the necessary cases to account for occupational related injuries. There were nine total false positives in this sample with 83 true positives. This yielded a Positive Predictive Value (PV+) of 90.2% for the full operational case definition. Further analyses will include examining the costs of these types of injuries, testing several years of the data to determine if any specific trends occur over time, and lastly comparing the MDH data with the MN OSHA data.

Conclusions: Occupational injury surveillance is the ongoing process of tracking and monitoring incidence rates, causes, circumstances resulting in fatal and non-fatal injuries and dissemination of this data is imperative in order to prevent these injuries from occurring.