Michigan Firearm Injury Information System: Development of a statewide near-realtime system for firearm injury surveillance in Michigan

Abstract

Firearm injury represents an urgent public health problem in the United States. A key barrier to addressing this problem is the lack of timely surveillance data. In particular, timely data could help community violence prevention workers identify foci for place-based intervention and know how to adapt their current activities to current spatiotemporal trends. In response to this need, we sought to adapt lessons learned during the development of a statewide system for opioid overdose surveillance in Michigan to the surveillance of firearm injuries.

We leveraged existing partnerships developed during the development of the Michigan System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance to acquire data for firearm injury surveillance. Our primary source for firearm mortality data are medical examiners (MEs) in the state, and the primary source for non-fatal injuries are Emergency Medical Services (EMS) runs. The initial study activities included onboarding of medical examiners, creation of a system to automatically clean, de-duplicate, and randomly displace locations (to prevent re-identification) of all records, and the design of a web-based dashboard to display spatiotemporal data summaries for community violence prevention stakeholder use.

The overall purpose of this project is to enhance the firearm injury data infrastructure the state of Michigan. In service to that, please see the three objectives below:

Objective 1: Obtain near-realtime fatal and non-fatal firearm incident data from all counties in Michigan

Objective 2: Create an online dashboard displaying fatal and non-fatal firearm incident data for the state of Michigan in near-realtime. This will include usability testing with end-users and promotion of its capabilities to partners and fellow public health professionals.

Objective 3: Explore the extent to which we can incorporate non-fatal emergency-medicine data into the dashboard to track and report on non-fatal incidents of gun violence.

Evaluations of how the availability and accessibility of this data may impact firearm injury response and prevention infrastructure will be forthcoming.