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The disclosure by General Motors in the spring of 1999 that private passenger vehicles record crash event data has lead to numerous proposals for the use of this data for engineering, crash research, liability, enforcement, traffic safety and medical uses.1 Many of these applications are traditional “static” uses where the time frame in which the data is collected is not critical to the use (within the bounds of a few days or weeks). Medical use of the data, however, for activation of EMS services and triage is a new “dynamic” use that requires immediate access to the data in order to achieve results. Currently the static and dynamic uses of the data may conflict, with use in one area potentially inhibiting use in the other. This arises in principal part because of protections generally provided to data secured and maintained incident to providing medical care.

NHTSA's Fatal Crash Reporting System (FARS) collects information on all US fatal public roadway motor vehicle crashes.1 However, FARS contains only the information “K”(killed) as injury information for the individuals sustaining fatal injuries. This paper discusses how a 100 fold improvement in injury detail can be obtained with ICD-9 mortality information by linking FARS with the Vital Statistics Multiple Cause of Death (MCOD) database.2 This link, developed by NHTSA, is accomplished on an individual by individual basis. The FARS database contains about 40,000 individuals killed per year, and nearly 25 years of data available. A multi-year linked FARS-MCOD database can contain detailed cause of death for more than 1,000,000 motor vehicle fatalities. The linked FARS-MCOD allows the reasons why people die in MVC to be studied down to specific vehicle make/model combinations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) National Accident Sampling System Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS) collects detailed information on a sample of all police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the United States that involved passenger vehicles towed from the scene due to damage.[1] This system's occupant injury definitions and severity levels, which are based on the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine's (AAAM) Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), are periodically updated. The last major revision, in 1993, changed the injury identifier of all injuries, added injuries, deleted injuries and changed the body region and severity of a substantial number of injuries.[1] These changes confound the direct combining or trending of pre-1993 and 1993 and later NASS data. This paper reports on the results of using a conversion method to equate pre-NASS-93 and NASS-93 and later injury descriptors and severities.

Two injury severity systems in widespread use by automobile manufacturers, motor vehicle accident investigators, researchers and trauma centers are the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) and the National Accident Sampling System (NASS) Occupant Injury Classification [1][2][3]. Updates of these systems by AAAM (AIS-90) and NHTSA (NASS93), prevent data collected in differing versions of these systems from being accurately combined or trended without severity adjustments. This paper discusses and summarizes major differences between these coding systems, compares the number and percent distribution of injuries by severity, and reviews the need for methods to adjust severity.