Development of the integrated New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) data warehouse: catalysing advancements in injury prevention research

Abstract

ObjectiveOur objective was to describe the development of the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) data warehouse—a unique and comprehensive data source that integrates state-wide administrative databases in NJ to enable the field of injury prevention to address critical, high-priority research questions.MethodsWe undertook an iterative process to link data from six state-wide administrative databases from NJ for the period of 2004 through 2018: (1) driver licensing histories, (2) traffic-related citations and suspensions, (3) police-reported crashes, (4) birth certificates, (5) death certificates and (6) hospital discharges (emergency department, inpatient and outpatient). We also linked to electronic health records of all NJ patients of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia network, census tract-level indicators (using geocoded residential addresses) and state-wide Medicaid/Medicare data. We used several metrics to evaluate the quality of the linkage process.ResultsAfter the linkage process was complete, the NJ-SHO data warehouse included linked records for 22.3 million distinct individuals. Our evaluation of this linkage suggests that the linkage was of high quality: (1) the median match probability—or likelihood of a match being true—among all accepted pairs was 0.9999 (IQR: 0.9999–1.0000); and (2) the false match rate—or proportion of accepted pairs that were false matches—was 0.0063.ConclusionsThe resulting NJ-SHO warehouse is one of the most comprehensive and rich longitudinal sources of injury data to date. The warehouse has already been used to support numerous studies and is primed to support a host of rigorous studies in the field of injury prevention.