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3.4 Nature of Injury

For injury-related deaths, nature of injury was determined according to the International Classification of Disease, 10th Revision⁷ (ICD-10) diagnosis codes (see Section 5.1 for more information about the underlying data). The reportable nature-of-injury categories are based on standard groupings of these diagnosis codes in the ICD-10 injury mortality diagnosis matrix pdf icon[pdf 38K]. This matrix was partially collapsed due to small numbers of injury-related deaths associated with some body region by nature-of-injury combinations. The reportable nature-of-injury categories for injury-related deaths are shown below (Table 8).

For injuries resulting in hospitalization subsequent to emergency department (ED) treatment or injuries resulting in an ED visit followed by release (without hospitalization or other transfer), the principal diagnosis code was assigned by trained hospital coders according to narrative information in patient medical records (see Section 5.2 for more information about the underlying data). The assigned principal diagnosis codes were translated, as closely as possible, to corresponding nature-of-injury groupings in the Barell Injury Diagnosis matrix pdf icon[pdf 65K]. Principal diagnosis is coded for all case records; diagnoses that do not fall into one of the specific nature-of-injury categories were translated to the reporting category other specified. The reportable nature-of-injury categories for these injuries are shown below (Table 9).

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