CHOP and HTS to Create Innovative Center to Promote Traffic Safety Across the State

The New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes Data Warehouse draws information from a wide variety of resources. Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS) are proud to announce the creation of a new center that will feature an interactive data dashboard to visualize, monitor, and track progress in traffic safety across communities and over time, with the intention of improving health and safety for all New Jersey residents.

For more than a decade, researchers from CHOP’s Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) have been conducting research using the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Data Warehouse, a collection of linked administrative data sets from New Jersey on traffic safety and health outcomes that currently contains more than 80 million records on 22 million New Jersey residents over a 15-year period. 

The NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data will expand the use of these data and provide information about injuries and safety to stakeholders through a publicly accessible website and interactive online dashboard. The data will go far beyond just crash data and examine demographic and community characteristics of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians to promote transportation equity for all.

“We commend our partners in New Jersey for expanding access to a wide array of data, which will encourage local and state-wide solutions for reducing the burden of injuries and deaths related to crashes,” says Allison E. Curry, PhD, director and principal investigator of the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data and a senior scientist at CIRP at CHOP. “We look forward to the next chapter of our decade-long partnership with HTS to improve health and safety by linking data in innovative ways.”

HTS is funding this project with a nearly $1.2 million year-long grant that will help take information available through the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse and advance it into an interactive tool, providing an unprecedented resource for injury-related data. With this funding, CIRP researchers will be able to update the data warehouse regularly with additional years and sources of data. CIRP researchers will also work with stakeholders across the state to make sure that this dashboard and the data it provides meets their needs. CIRP has already collaborated with a multitude of state agencies and community partners to accomplish the extraordinary data linkage required.

“Establishing the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data, and the data dashboard within it, fulfills an important objective of our state’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) to address traffic safety data quality, integration, and accessibility,” says Michael J. Rizol, Jr., Director of HTS. “Under the leadership of Governor Murphy and Attorney General Platkin, we are committed to moving toward zero deaths on our roads, and the creation of the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data will help us get there.”

With the resources provided by the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse to date, CIRP researchers have published more than more than three dozen peer-reviewed papers, covering topics including Kyleigh’s Law, Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) policies, child passenger safety, older drivers, vulnerable road users and transportation equity.