The University of North Carolina Health Services Research Center and Department of Surgery propose to merge data from several databases describing the emergency and hospital care of injured patients to determine if there are structural differences in the way patients from rural verses urban areas are treated, and if there are differences in their outcomes, and costs. This research project will merge data from the North Carolina Trauma Registry, the North Carolina Ambulance Call database, the North Carolina Medical Database Commission discharge summaries, the North Carolina Medical Examiner's database, and other public use data sets to address these questions. The analysis will focus on differences in patient outcomes for individuals who are transported directly from the scene of an injury to a Level-1 trauma center hospital versus those who are first transported to another facility and then transferred to a trauma center. The analysis, which will be carried out over one year, will assist policy makers in developing guidelines for the organization and operating rules for rural emergency medical services systems.
