Improving on EU injury reporting and surveillance
With the support of EU funding, members of the INTEGRIS project set out to enhance data collection on accidents and disabilities as well as the reporting of official EU health statistics. These were to be achieved by linking the prevention-oriented European Injury Data Base (IDB) with the routine Hospital Discharge Register (HDR) — and possibly also the Emergency Department Registers (EDR). Various objectives were outlined with a view to demonstrating and evaluating the feasibility of such integration. Project work covered the areas of technology and organisation, data quality, integration and protection, health statistics, new technology, and added value for national health systems. An INTEGRIS dataset was created streamlining IDB/HDR data made up of eight out of 22 non-optional variables from the routine HDR and EDR. Covering age, gender, country, date and time of admission, treatment, ICD10 diagnoses and length of stay, these variables replace the respective IDB dataset variables. Such a move reduces the burden of data collection in IDB hospitals by about one third. Internal project evaluation revealed high overall acceptance for the INTEGRIS-type data collection in the pilot countries (six in total), with high specific acceptance by participating hospitals. These successes covered two major project objectives, while another two were achieved with the launch of the public INTEGRIS database (see http://www.rp7integris.eu). This comprises all the INTEGRIS features that were developed for enhanced hospital-based injury surveillance, such as integration of external cause information, and injury disability indicators for temporary and lifelong consequences. The INTEGRIS consortium also made certain data collection recommendations, and its 'Proposal for EU-wide implementation' offered country-specific requirements for the level of detail and the quantity of IDB/INTEGRIS data to be provided. Given the annual numbers of deaths as a result of accident or violence (some 257 000 EU citizens) and the approximately 50 million individuals seeking medical treatment for injury, the initiative's efforts contribute to major related areas, including improved injury reporting and surveillance. Importantly, they also offer policy support through improved health statistics and therefore better means of deriving accident and injury indicators. INTEGRIS project successes thus have much to offer in the way of addressing the EU's 'injury challenge'. They improve on the European Statistical System (ESS) quality criteria for data collection as related to relevance, accuracy and reliability, timeliness and punctuality, coherence and comparability, and accessibility and clarity. The INTEGRIS added-value dataset, developed with special attention to operationalisation, quality and comparability, will also facilitate the data management work of under- resourced hospitals.
