New Dashboard Shares EMS Traffic Crash Data

NHTSA Office of EMS dashboard offers NEMSIS traffic crash data for use beyond EMS

Every day, EMS clinicians gather important patient and response data from traffic crashes throughout the country. EMS researchers, as well as local and state EMS systems, often use this data, but its usefulness can go well beyond the EMS community. Thanks to a new tool made possible by the National EMS Information System (NEMSIS), anyone can now easily access and analyze the information.

Seeing an opportunity to share this valuable information with EMS partners in industries such as healthcare and traffic safety, the NHTSA Office of EMS recently created a visually interactive presentation of traffic crash data gathered by EMS. The National EMS Dashboard makes available the important data collected by EMS personnel at the scene of traffic accidents, including:

• Type and time of EMS response

• The patient’s primary symptoms

• Type of care provided by EMS practitioners

• Time taken to transport the patient to a healthcare destination

“With more than 25 million EMS activations submitted to the National EMS Database each year, the dashboard offers a truly robust source of publicly available pre-hospital emergency care data appropriate for original research and analysis,” says Jeremy Kinsman, MPH, an Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health fellow with the NHTSA Office of EMS who helped develop the dashboard. “The Office of EMS hopes the dashboard data reaches beyond EMS into other health- and safety-related industries. The amount of data collected each year will continue to grow, and uses of those data will as well.”

There are several resources including Q&A documents and a how-to guide available online under “Resources.”