"I wasn't texting; I was just reading an email …": a qualitative study of distracted driving enforcement in Washington State.

Background: In response to the rise of distracted driving, many countries and most US states have adopted laws to restrict the use of handheld phones for drivers. Specific provisions of each law and the overall social mores of distracted driving influence enforceability and impact.

Objectives: Identify multilevel interdependent factors that influence distracted driving enforcement through the perspective of police officers.

Industrial Injury Hospitalizations Billed to Payers Other Than Workers' Compensation: Characteristics and Trends by State.

Objective: To describe characteristics of industrial injury hospitalizations, and to test the hypothesis that industrial injuries were increasingly billed to non-workers' compensation (WC) payers over time.

Data Sources: Hospitalization data for 1998-2009 from State Inpatient Databases, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Study Design: Retrospective secondary analyses described the distribution of payer, age, gender, race/ethnicity, and injury severity for injuries identified using industrial place of occurrence codes.

Improving occupational injury surveillance by using a severity threshold: development of a new occupational health indicator.

Background: Hospital discharge data are used for occupational injury surveillance, but observed hospitalisation trends are affected by trends in healthcare practices and workers' compensation coverage that may increasingly impair ascertainment of minor injuries relative to severe injuries. The objectives of this study were to (1) describe the development of a severe injury definition for surveillance purposes and (2) assess the impact of imposing a severity threshold on estimated occupational and non-occupational injury trends.

Methods: Three independent methods were used to estimate injury severity for the severe injury definition.

Case identification of work-related traumatic brain injury using the occupational injury and illness classification system.

Objectives: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common, costly, and disabling occupational injuries. Objectives included determining whether work-related TBI could be reliably identified using the Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System (OIICS) and describing challenges in developing an OIICS-based TBI case definition.

Methods: Washington State trauma registry reports and workers' compensation claims were linked (1998 to 2008).

Predicting work-related disability and medical cost outcomes: a comparison of injury severity scoring methods.

Introduction: Acute work-related trauma is a leading cause of death and disability among U.S. workers.

Predicting work-related disability and medical cost outcomes: estimating injury severity scores from workers' compensation data.

Purpose: Acute work-related trauma is a leading cause of death and disability among US workers. The research objectives were to assess: (1) the feasibility of estimating Abbreviated Injury Scale-based injury severity scores (ISS) from ICD-9-CM codes available in workers' compensation (WC) medical billing data, (2) whether ISS predicts work-related disability and medical cost outcomes, (3) whether ISS adds value over other injury severity proxies, and (4) whether the utility of ISS differs for an all-injury sample compared with three specific injury samples (amputations, extremity fractures, traumatic brain injury).

Methods: ISS was estimated from ICD-9-CM codes using Stata's user-written -icdpic- program for 208,522 compensable nonfatal WC claims for workers injured in Washington State from 1998 to 2008.

Overview of motorcycling in the United States: a national telephone survey.

Objectives: Motorcycle registrations have risen in recent years. Although motorcyclist crash fatalities in 2009 were 16% lower than in 2008, they were double the number of deaths in 1997. The present study examined current motorcyclists' travel patterns and views of motorcycle helmets and other safety topics.

Evaluation of US rear underride guard regulation for large trucks using real-world crashes.

Current requirements for rear underride guards on large trucks are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) 223 and 224. The standards have been in place since 1998, but their adequacy has not been evaluated apart from two series of controlled crash tests. The current study used detailed reviews of real-world crashes from the Large Truck Crash Causation Study to assess the ability of guards that comply with certain aspects of the regulation to mitigate passenger vehicle underride.

Front air bag nondeployments in frontal crashes fatal to drivers or right-front passengers.

Objective: Public concern has arisen about the reliability of front air bags because Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data indicate many nondeployed air bags in fatal frontal crashes. However, the accuracy of air bag deployment, the variable in question, is uncertain. This study aimed to provide more certain estimates of nondeployment incidence in fatal frontal crashes.