The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) and the National Medical Center will build a system to link and jointly use the injury and emergency care data each holds. The two plan to analyze data spanning the occurrence of an injury through emergency treatment and follow-up care, strengthening the evidence base for national injury prevention and emergency medical policy.
The KDCA and the National Medical Center said they signed a memorandum of understanding to that effect on the 27th at the agency's headquarters in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province.
Under the agreement, the two sides will provide and share the agency's national injury survey data and the National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS) data operated by the National Emergency Medical Center under the National Medical Center. The KDCA collects information on the causes of injuries and risk factors through its in-depth survey of hospital discharges for injuries, its in-depth survey of injury patients in emergency rooms and its community-based severe trauma survey. The National Medical Center manages data on treatment and medical service use by emergency patients, drawing on NEDIS records from emergency medical institutions nationwide.
The two organizations will link the two data sets to create a foundation for analyzing both the characteristics of injury cases and the emergency treatment and care that follows. They will also pursue joint research on producing and managing statistics on injuries, health hazards and emergency care, and on developing comprehensive national injury statistics and comprehensive national emergency care statistics.
Until now, the agency's injury surveys have been strong at identifying the causes and characteristics of injuries in depth, while NEDIS broadly captures the actual flow of treatment at emergency medical institutions across the country. Linking the two, the organizations said, will allow a more multidimensional analysis extending from the occurrence of an injury to emergency treatment and care.
"Linking NEDIS with the KDCA's injury survey data will allow us to grasp more broadly the characteristics of injury patients and the treatment they receive in emergency care settings," Seo Kil-joon, president of the National Medical Center, said. "We will advance the comprehensive national emergency care statistics and strengthen the evidence that can be used in policy and in the field."
Lim Seung-kwan, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said, "We will build stage-by-stage data from the occurrence of an injury through emergency treatment and care, and strengthen evidence-based injury prevention policy."
