CHIR Trauma Registry

This is a proposal to create the capacity to organize and maintain a centralized data warehouse that combines patient level information from the eight Level 1 Trauma Centers in Arizona and the Arizona Burn Center, Maricopa Integrated Health Systems (MIHS) regional burn center, with patient level information from Arizona HealthQuery (AZHQ). The first objective is to identify errors and omissions that severely restrict the use of the data by individual trauma centers to meet the criteria of scholarly publication that the American College of Surgeons has adopted as its criterion for certification. The second objective is to collaborate with each center to modify its data collection process to minimize errors and omissions. Once minimum error data sets are created for each Center, patient level data will be merged with patient level claims information and some clinical data from AZHQ for five million patients in Arizona. The AZHQ data include information on health care conditions that are unlikely to be collected by a trauma center but which could significantly influence the outcomes of a given mode of care for an injury. The merged data will be aggregated across the eight centers and the Arizona Burn Center to be used as a reference against which individual centers can compare their processes, outcomes and use the information to establish benchmarks and improve their care. The data will also be available as a research repository that can be used by the centers to develop the research needed to meet the ACS criteria for certification. The final objective of the proposed project is the development and testing of the architecture for a web based reporting system that could be accessed by the centers for routine reports. The operation and updating of the web based reporting system will require funding in addition to the funding requested for this project.