No single data set is sufficient to assess injury prevention priorities. As shown in the table, access to 2 or more data sets may be necessary to detect specific types of injury problems, design interventions to address these problems, and evaluate how well the interventions work. Using more than one data set to address an injury problem is faster, easier, and produces data of better quality if the data systems responsible for collecting and managing data are integrated.
Integration is facilitated when data are collected in similar ways.
Case definitions should be developed so that data can be obtained from existing data sets in a comparable manner and linked to data from other sources without ambiguity or double-counting. Injury prevention can achieve greater integration with traditional public health activities if its data systems can be used to support other program efforts within and even outside the state health department. In the absence of unique identifying information, such as a social security number, for each injured person in every data record for a particular injury, probabilistic data linkages using combinations of other variables such as age, sex, and zip code are often possible. However, data integration is much easier to achieve when individuals can be identified by social security number or some other unique identifier, irrespective of how many different data systems have data on that individual. The CSTE Surveillance Definitions Rev.