New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Data Warehouse
The New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Data Warehouse is being used by CIRP researchers and collaborators to advance safety and health research through novel administrative data linkages. Led by Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH, the research team developed a comprehensive data warehouse that integrates various New Jersey statewide administrative databases.
This unique data source contains information spanning the pre-injury period to the post-injury period, supporting critical, high-priority research questions on injury prevention. Researchers are also analyzing the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse to address novel questions in other areas of population health.
This comprehensive data warehouse includes safety and health data on 24 million New Jersey residents over a 17-year period (2004-2020). Data sources include six statewide administrative databases and individual- and community-level equity indicators, enabling rigorous investigation of injury and non-injury outcomes. It is the backbone of the new NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data, funded by the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS). with a guiding vision to reimagine how safety and health data are collected, integrated, analyzed, and shared to support safe transport in NJ. More than 45 scientific papers have been publishing the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse and numerous studies are underway.
Development of the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse
The NJ-SHO Data Warehouse allows us to fill numerous important gaps in safety and health research. Initially, we focused on creating a resource that would enable the field of motor vehicle safety to address critical, high-priority research questions. We utilized licensing, crash report, and traffic-related citations data, along with childhood electronic health records and census tract-level indicators, to conduct a range of innovative studies. This research has uniquely advanced our foundational understanding of drivers and their crashes, directly impacted driver safety policy, and proposed novel traffic safety methodologies.
Since 2017, we have updated the initial databases with the most recent data and added three additional statewide databases maintained by the New Jersey Department of Health: birth certificates, death certificates, and hospital discharge data. To integrate these databases, we conducted a large probabilistic linkagethat included all identifiable individual-level records from all databases (including those previously linked in the initial development of the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse).
The resulting NJ-SHO Data Warehouse includes all distinct individuals who appear in one or more original database and contains all records associated with those individuals. With careful consideration toward optimizing the use of NJ-SHO data to advance pediatric injury research, we purposefully structured the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse to:
- Contain rich individual-level data that spans the pre-injury period to the post-injury period for motor vehicle crashes, as well as other injury mechanisms
- Include unique data features that enable investigation of urgent research questions that could not be previously addressed due to a lack of appropriate data
Data Security
All NJ-SHO activities (A) are bound by legal agreements between CHOP and data owners that specify stringent data security measures and (B) have been reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Boards at CHOP and the NJ Department of Health. All data elements that are considered protected health identifiers are stored on a secure drive that is accessible only to research staff directly involved with the data integration process.
Click here to learn about our studies that utilized the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse.
For more information on this data resource, please contact us.
