Violence Prevention and Intervention through Data Systems

Violence is a leading public health problem. The scope of violence, encompasses diverse classifications of intentional and unintentional injury. Many disciplines are involved, including those from public health, medicine, social work, health behavior, maternal child health, exercise science, law enforcement, highway safety, and even urban and regional planning. Violence surveillance is necessary to identify the patterns and types of injury in the population. This will assist with effectively quantifying and designing interventions to prevent further injury and violence. Several problems exist: 1) Lack of readily available information on injury cause/mechanism. Injury cases are often entered on a paper or electronic chart then later transcribed into a record. Data is then sent to the state to have similar data entered into a different database, 2) Injury and violence prevention interventions are sometimes established from disciplines with a limited opportunity to collaborate. This leads to many gaps affecting injury prevention services and prevention. This impairs the ability to perform violence assessment for emergency and public safety personnel as well as practitioners lacking a cohesive historical record.  

The Multi-Agency Injury Database System will be presented to describe its objective to improve injury data collection in real-time through bridging the qualitative and quantitative data methods in order to streamline  injury data points into a singular knowledge data system for violence intervention and prevention efforts at the local, state and federal level.