About the Center

The New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Center for Integrated Data at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Center for Injury Research and Prevention is reimagining how safety and health data are collected, integrated, analyzed, and shared to support safe transport in NJ. Together with the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS), we are sharing innovative people-focused data with communities across the state.

NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data

History

Researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) created the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data to provide valuable information about injuries and traffic safety to stakeholders across NJ. The origin of the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data began in 2010 when Dr. Allison Curry worked with Melissa Pfeiffer to link NJ crash and licensing records to evaluate the impact of a Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) program on young drivers. This research was the beginning of the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse and was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Over the next few years, we added additional sources to the data warehouse through grants funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health and Child Development. These grants focused on populations of drivers with ADHD and autistic drivers identified through CHOP electronic health records. We also obtained hospital discharge data, birth certificates, and death certificates with a Data Use Agreement from the New Jersey Department of Health, allowing us to expand our populations of interest and to branch out beyond transportation outcomes to all injury outcomes.

In 2022, we were awarded a grant from the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS) to develop an interactive, public-facing website and people-focused data dashboard powered by the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse. Our two main goals are: 1) to encourage data use and data sharing among stakeholders to support safe transport for all and 2) to share information with communities interested in learning how to use data integration and visualization to improve safety.

Mission

Our mission is to promote a safe and healthy NJ through innovative data linkage and data sharing to support community-based solutions that reduce injury and death.

Why NJ-SHO?

Collaborating to Improve Traffic Safety

Traffic safety remains a public health priority across the country, including in New Jersey. Road to Zero and the Safe System Approach encourage increased collaboration among traffic safety partners through data integration so that they track progress in road safety as countermeasures are implemented.

Comprehensive, People-Focused Data

Sometimes information about the health and characteristics of individuals is missing from a single data source. Integrating data from multiple sources can improve the quality and completeness of important data elements that help describe the transportation safety experience among different populations. For example, hospital and crash records are integrated, which provides a more complete picture of crash-related injuries and allows for investigation of safety outcomes among individuals with medical conditions. Our unique data linkage also allows us to examine where the people involved in crashes live and their demographics.

Equity As Priority

The US Department of Transportation's Equity Action Plan sets equity as a priority at the national level, calling for eliminating disparities in roadway fatalities and serious injuries. NJ has followed this call by listing equity as a cross-cutting emphasis area to ensure that equity is considered in all elements of its safety plan. Our people-focused Dashboard includes individual equity measures like race and ethnicity that are not available in most crash reports, as well as community metrics that provide equity information at the neighborhood level.

Experienced Team

The NJ-SHO multidisciplinary team of scientists, project managers, and communications professionals has extensive expertise in data integration, epidemiology, outreach, and equity. The team has published more than 45 peer-reviewed research papers using the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse, covering topics including the effects of Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) laws in NJ, transportation equity, driver licensing rates among teen and older drivers, and crash circumstances of drivers with medical conditions, older drivers, pedestrians, and other vulnerable populations.

Meet the Team

NJ-SHO Data Warehouse

The NJ-SHO Data Warehouse is a linked database of administrative datasets from NJ on traffic safety and health outcomes that currently contains more than 124 million records on 24 million individuals over a 17-year period (2004-2020). By linking records for the same individuals across datasets, their experiences can be seen within the larger context of their lives.

Learn More About the Data Warehouse

NJ-SHO Data Dashboard

The NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data and New Jersey HTS are taking a people-focused, data-driven approach to help communities reduce injuries and fatalities on our roadways. Users of the NJ-SHO Data Dashboard can compare transportation safety and injury metrics over time, by community, and by population characteristics. This innovative tool offers 10 views: Traffic Safety Overview, Road Users, Behaviors, Maps, Drivers, Young Drivers, Older Drivers, Pedestrians, Bicyclists, and Equity.

Explore the Dashboard

Extensive Research Program

The NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data team and its partners have published more than 45 peer-reviewed research articles on health and transportation safety and mobility, including the effects of Graduated Driver Licensing laws in NJ, transportation equity, and crash risk of autistic drivers, older drivers, pedestrians, and other vulnerable populations. We have also advanced best practices and developed innovative approaches to manage and analyze traffic safety data.

See List of Publications

What's next?

We are excited about conducting the next round of data integration, which will bring in additional years of data for current sources and add Emergency Medical Services data.

News & Upcoming Events