5-07-2024 6:58pm

ICYMI: CHOP and NJ HTS Launch New Website Dedicated to Promoting Traffic Safety

Donnella Tilery Editor

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)’s New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Center for Integrated Data and the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety (HTS) are pleased to announce the launch of njsho.chop.edu, a website that features an interactive data dashboard that enables users to visualize, monitor, and track important traffic safety measures across communities and over time.

The NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data team is reimagining how data are collected, integrated, analyzed, and shared to support safe transport in New Jersey. The data dashboard offers access to previously unavailable data to guide and evaluate local and statewide solutions for reducing the burden of injury and deaths. The website also shares evidence-based injury prevention, transportation equity, and traffic safety resources to help drive positive change throughout the state.

“Every community has unique transportation safety concerns,” said Allison E. Curry, PhD, the principal investigator of the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data and a senior scientist at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP. “We hope that regional, local, and community partners will use our dashboard to implement safety efforts that ultimately move the needle on reducing crashes.”

For more than a decade, researchers from CHOP’s Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) have been conducting studies using the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse, a collection of linked administrative datasets from NJ on traffic safety and health outcomes they created. The resource currently contains more than 124 million records on 24 million individuals over a 17-year period.

HTS is supporting the NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data with over $2.5 million in funding. Along with the launch of this website and dashboard, this funding will allow the team to continue updating the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse regularly with additional years and sources of data and to work with stakeholders across the state to make the website and dashboard as useful and impactful as possible.

"By innovating how we harness, analyze, and share data, we're gaining invaluable insights into traffic safety in New Jersey and empowering communities and policymakers with the tools to enact meaningful change – all with the goal of reducing fatalities on our roadways," said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin.

"Through the grant funding we have made available to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, its New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes Center for Integrated Data is offering unprecedented access to crucial information that will help promote transportation equity and bring us toward a safer future for everyone."

With the resources provided by the NJ-SHO Data Warehouse to date, CIRP researchers have published dozens of peer-reviewed papers, covering topics including effects of Graduated Driver Licensing policies, transportation equity, and driving outcomes of autistic drivers, older drivers, pedestrians, and other vulnerable populations.

The NJ-SHO Center for Integrated Data was also made possible through partnerships with other New Jersey agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the Motor Vehicle Commission, the Department of Health, and the Office of Information Technology.