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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.