Research In Action
Research In Action
"Data is for everyone" is the theme of this year's International Love Data Week, but what does data look like in different fields and how do different people use data? At CIRP, our researchers developed a variety of research tools and data resources as part of an interdisciplinary approach to child injury prevention science. Here is a brief introduction to just a few of them:
The Prospective Studies of Acute Child Trauma and Recovery (PACT/R) Data Archive
Led by Dr. Nancy Kassam-Adams, the PACT/R brings together international datasets representing more than 5,500 children and adolescents exposed to trauma to track PTSD risk and protective factors. This archive enables researchers to overcome barriers often associated with small samples from individual studies, including limited generalizability and wide variation. By increasing data access to researchers around the world and making it available for re-use, the archive promotes 'FAIR' data practices, and the resulting integrated analyses advance our understanding of how children recover after trauma.
In 2021, the PACT/R framework was used as the foundation for the launch of the Child Trauma Prevention and Treatment (CTPT) Data Archive. This ongoing project will develop new methods for harmonizing study- and participant-level intervention data in the child trauma field and enable analyses of trauma prevention and treatment effectiveness.
New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Data Warehouse
This research tool is used by CIRP researchers and collaborators to advance safety and health research and associated epidemiologic methods through novel administrative data linkages. Led by Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH, the research team developed a comprehensive data warehouse that includes the full licensing, citation, and crash history of every New Jersey driver between 2004 and 2018. Since 2017, the databases were updated with additional statewide databases maintained by the New Jersey Department of Health: birth certificates, death certificates, and hospital discharge data. Individual-level records from all databases were integrated using large probabilitistic linkage, supporting high-priority research questions on injury prevention.
By utilizing licensing, crash report, and traffic-related citations data, researchers were able to advance our understanding of drivers and their crashes, directly impacted driver safety policy, and proposed novel traffic safety methodologies. With the rich individual-level data that spans the pre-injury period to the post-injury period for other injury mechanisms as well, the NJ-SHO database enables investigation of research questions that previously could not be addressed due to lack of appropriate data.
ARCUS
To facilitate early identification of mental health needs, healthcare providers in CHOP's Emergency Department (ED) utilize the Behavioral Health Screen for the ED, a self-administered survey offered to all patients ages 14-19 inquiring about symptoms of depression, suicidal ideation, trauma, firearm access, and substance abuse. Based on the results, clinicians can initiate a discussion with the patient, offer resources as needed, consult with behavioral health providers if needed, and follow up with the patient's primary care provider to ensure continuity of care. Research shows that a multifaceted intervention including education and an electronic health record alert improved ED documentation, communication, and primary care provider follow-up of issues identified during the ED-based behavioral health screen.
De-identified data from the Behavioral Health Screen are stored in ARCUS, a unique library comprised of all data generated at CHOP over the course of patients' clinical encounters and research study visits throughout their childhood.
