title: Feasibility of road traffic injury surveillance integrating police and health insurance data sets in the Dominican Republic.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To assess the feasibility of semiautomated linking of road traffic injury (RTI) cases in different data sets in low- and middle-income countries.
  
  
  METHODS
  The study population consisted of RTI cases in the Dominican Republic in 2010 and were identified in police and health insurance data sets. After duplicates were removed and fatality reporting was corrected by using forensic data, police and health insurance RTI records were linked if they had the same province, collision date, and gender of RTI cases and similar age within five years. A multinomial logistic regression model assessed the likelihood of being in only one of the data sets.
  
  
  RESULTS
  One of five records was a duplicate, including 21.1% of 6 396 police and 16.2% of 6 178 insurance records. Health insurance data recorded 43 of 417 deaths as only injured. Capture - recapture estimated that both data sets recorded one of five RTI cases. Characteristics associated with increased likelihood (P < 0.05) of being only in the police data set were female gender [adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 2.5], age ≥ 16 years (OR = 1.7), collision in the regions of Cibao Northeast (OR = 4.1) and Valdesia (OR = 6.4), day of occurrence from Tuesday to Saturday (ORs from 1.5 to 2.9), month of occurrence from October to December (ORs from 1.6 to 4.5), and occupant of four-wheeled vehicles (OR = 5.4) or trucks (OR = 5.3).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Consistent semiautomated linking procedures were feasible to ascertain the RTI burden in the Dominican Republic and could be improved by standardized coding of police and health insurance RTI reporting.
authors.affiliation: Escuela de Salud Publica, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. apuello60@uasd.edu.do
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Puello
authors.forename: Junaid
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bhatti
authors.forename: Louis-Rachid
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Salmi
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000401:mortality / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001642:Bicycling / Q000293:injuries; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004293:Dominican Republic / Q000453:epidemiology; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007344:Insurance Claim Reporting / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D018986:Motor Vehicles / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016495:Police; D011159:Population Surveillance; D011996:Records / Q000592:standards; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology; D055815:Young Adult