The New Jersey State Dept. of Health's Occupational Health Program has initiated work on a comprehensive surveillance system of occupational illness and injury. The purposes of this system are to define the extent of the occupational health problem in the State, and to identify workplaces for interventions. The long-term goal of this project is to provide this system with a means of surveying serious, non-fatal, occupational injuries in New Jersey.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of the Universal Bill-Patient Summary (UB-82) database of all hospital discharges in the State of New Jersey for the surveillance and epidemiologic study of serious, non-fatal, occupational injuries. We plan to describe the population of injury cases reported to the UB-82 system, determine the extent to which work-related injuries can be ascertained from the system, and determine how the UB-82 system can best be used for surveillance. We will also examine the value of the UB-82 system for ascertaining cases not found in the State of New Jersey's workers' compensation files. Specifically, we plan to: 1. Collect information in individuals reported to the UB-82 system, who had one of four different types of injury. 2. Determine the proportion of cases for each type of injury that were work-related. 3. Describe the population of work-related cases for each type of injury by the type of job held and the industry in which they worked. 4. Describe the characteristics of cases for each type of work- related injury that was not covered by workers' compensation, and compare them to those work-related injuries that were covered by workers' compensation. 5. Determine the types of injury and the characteristics of the populations for which the UB-82 would provide the best surveillance. 6. Determine whether ICD-E codes would provide a significant increase in the quality and usefulness of data collected by the UB- 82 system for surveillance purposes.
