IDPH Enhances Trauma Registry for National Compliance, Easier Exports

For many years, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) has collected and tracked data on trauma patients and the outcome of their care. Health agencies in other states collected similar data, and in early 2008, the American College of Surgeons established their own nationwide database, the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB).

NTDB required a standardized format for the trauma data collected by state health agencies and trauma centers. In order to contribute this vital database, IDPH needed to have the capability to export trauma incident data in the XML format that was accepted by the NTDB.

In the first component of the compliance project, Dunn Solutions Group modified IDPH’s current web-based Trauma Registry system to capture, document, analyze and store all data elements specified by NTDB. This work required the application to collect additional data (30% more), including information such as patient’s occupational industry, airbag deployment and initial eye, verbal and motor readings.

The second component of the project migrated existing trauma incidents in the database, and modify existing reports to work and develop new reports to within the new data model.

The third component was to create a custom application that transforms all the reports and data to conform to NTDB standards and then output it as XML files.

The new Trauma Registry application allows for scheduled exports by authorized users at each hospital to the NTDB, IDPH administrators and other requesting users. And it provides the functionality to select individual patient incidents for exporting by request from the NTDB.

Most important, IDPH can now export data to the National Trauma Database. This data facilitates research efforts, and helps uncover national trends in trauma care, determine resources for disaster preparedness and contributes to the evaluation of trauma patient outcomes.