Federal Initiative Provides Insights To Help States Reduce Motor Vehicle Crashes

A collaboration between private and public entities was announced today at the National Association of State EMS Officials annual conference that will help reduce deaths and serious injuries as well as prevent transportation-related motor vehicle crashes (MVC) on the nation’s highway system. Motor Vehicle Crash Incident Visualization will grant highway traffic safety officers the use of near-real time dashboards to identify high risk areas and trends in behavioral incidents. The MVC Incident Visualization software, developed by Lakeville-based ImageTrend, is a collaborative initiative with The United States Department of Transportation (DOT), The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and The National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS). The initiative supports the objectives of the USDOT’s National Roadway Safety Strategy, specifically to create safer roads, safer speeds and enhance post-crash care.

Purpose

The purpose of the partnership is to provide near real-time Emergency Medical Service (EMS) data that meets the requirements of state, territorial and federal agencies, empowering them with easily accessible insights to optimize the safety of the nation's roadway network and its users.

Why is this important?

EMS responds to more than 1.4M motor vehicle crash-related injuries annually. Federal and state entities rely on motor vehicle crash incident data to identify areas for improvement within their communities and along the roadway systems, which they use to request funding to impact overall public safety. Often agencies manually collect data, making it challenging to analyze and garner insights. MVC Incident Visualization will offer a systemic approach with near real-time data, giving users the ability to swiftly identify areas of safety vulnerabilities. Analyzing motor vehicle crashes, understanding why they happen, and what can be done to prevent them from happening is the intelligence gained. Working together, we will help all parties involved use the dashboards to look at MVC insights from a predictive perspective. In short, the MVC Incident Visualization dashboard insights system is an industry gamechanger.

Some of the core features of MVC Incident Visualization are:

• Nationwide aggregation of MVC incidents.
• Near real-time, configurable analytics.
• Dashboards to filter incidents in multiple ways, for example by geographic area, type of fatality/injury, gender, race, involvement or use of drugs or alcohol, vehicle type, road type and much more.
• Ability to analyze patient outcomes across the continuum of care.
• Public display of motor vehicle crash analytics.

”We must strive for zero roadway fatalities and severe injuries – no other number is acceptable,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

“This is a win-win for all parties involved,” said Joe Graw, ImageTrend Chief Growth Officer. “One of the biggest challenges we hear from our customers is the ability to provide timely data and insights to key stakeholders to demonstrate the need for additional resources and funding to keep our communities and roads safe. This initiative delivers a solution to directly address that problem.”

States interested in learning more may reach out to NEMSIS.