Citation

Maio RF, Takla R, Gregor MA. Proc. Assoc. Adv. Automot. Med. Annu. Conf. 1993; 37: 424-425.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1993, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

E-Codes are essential to appropriate injury surveillance and control. E-Codes are routinely determined by state health departments for patients dying from injuries, but are often not determined, by hospital records personnel, for those injured patients admitted to hospital who do not die. Also, in the United States, there is essentially no E-Codes determination for those injured patients who are treated and released from hospital emergency departments (ED). Ambulance report forms (ARF) are completed by ambulance personnel who have first hand exposure to the injury scene, completed for all patients transported to the hospital regardless of patient disposition from the ED, maintained on file for several years by most ambulance agencies and are usually only 1 to 2 pages in length. These conditions make the ARF an attractive E-Code data source. To date there has been no published evaluations of the ARF as a sole data source for E-Codes. The purpose of our study is two fold: 1) To determine if the ARF can be used as an appropriate sole data source for E-Coding of patients transported by ambulance; 2) To determine if non-hospital data collectors/abstractors can appropriately perform E-Coding using the ARF as the sole data source.