Innovation and Discovery Highlights

The Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE) received $296,500 from the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety (GOHS) to measure seat belt use rates in Georgia in 2024. This will be the third year that IPRCE has estimated seat belt use rates using roadside observations. IPRCE will be sending observers into 20 Georgia counties to observe seat belt and child restraint use. Rates of driver distraction, including handheld cell phone use, will also be measured.  The study results will provide insight into how factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, and age group affect seat belt use and driver distraction.

“Seat belt use for drivers and right front passengers in Georgia decreased from 89.3% in 2022 to 87.6% in 2023,” said Jonathan Rupp, PhD, the seat belt use study’s director. At the same time, rates of driver hand-held cell phone use increased from 5.8% to 6.8% of drivers. Using a seat belt use is one of the best ways to prevent injury and death for a person involved in a motor vehicle crash, and preventing driver distraction is one of the best ways to prevent crashes. Dr. Rupp noted that “It is important for us to track seat belt use rates and driver distraction and how they vary across the state so that we know where to target efforts to increase belt use and reduce distraction.” Results of this survey will be used to assess progress on Georgia’s work to reduce death and injury in motor-vehicle crashes by increasing rates of restraint use. IPRCE shares this data with GOHS-facilitated State Highway Safety Plan task teams who are developing programs and organizing efforts to prevent injury. 

“The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety and our partners continue to implement programs designed to save lives and promote safe driving behaviors,” said Allen Poole, Director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety. “We ask everyone to help our state and nation reach the attainable goal of zero traffic deaths by driving safe speeds, always wearing a seat belt, keeping the focus on the road and not the phone, and never operating a vehicle under the influence of any substance that impairs your ability to drive,” continued Poole.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that 42,915 people were killed in traffic crashes in the United States in 2021, which is a more than ten percent increase from 2020 and the most traffic deaths in the nation since 2005.  Federal data shows that pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. increased by 13 percent from 2021 to 2020 and the number of speeding-related crashes increased in 2021 by five percent compared to 2020.

Road side observations of seat belt use will be performed in the following counties, starting in May 2024: Cobb, DeKalb, Early, Floyd, Gwinnett, Habersham, Haralson, Harris, Hart, Monroe, Morgan, Murray, Peach, Polk, Richmond, Rockdale, Spalding, Thomas, Ware, and Worth.

For the second year, the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory University (IPRCE) is conducting the seat belt survey for the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety (GOHS). IPRCE received a grant for $300,000 from the GOHS to conduct the survey. IPRCE will be sending observers into select Georgia counties to observe seat belt and child restraint use as well as driver distraction including cell phone use. The roadside observations are used to estimate overall seat belt usage in the state. They also provide insight into how factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, and age group impact seat belt use and allow for the comparison of belt use in different regions and counties in Georgia. The survey observers are students recruited from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. IPRCE is also collaborating with the Georgia Department of Public Health’s Injury Prevention Program in the collection of the child restraint data.

Allen Poole, Director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, said, “The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety is working with all of our highway safety partners to reverse the increase in traffic deaths we have seen in the United States in the last two years and the goal of this project is to prevent crashes and save lives on our roads. We ask everyone to join the mission of saving lives on our roads by driving the speed limit, wearing your seat belt, staying off the phone when driving, and never driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

The Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory University (IPRCE), Grady Health System and collaborators at the University of Michigan have been awarded a five-year, $4.4 million project to continue studying motor vehicle crashes in metro-Atlanta that result in injuries treated at Grady. This project, funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is the next phase of research on motor-vehicle crashes and will expand the team’s focus to include pedestrian crashes.

The team’s previous car crash research began in 2017 and focused on injuries to vehicle occupants and how to improve driver and passenger safety. The latest award supports Emory and Grady’s continued role as a Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) Center, and will also study crashes where vehicles strike pedestrians. 

CIREN centers are one of NHTSA’s major data collection systems examining motor vehicle crashes. There are six other CIREN Centers in the United States, with a goal of improving vehicle safety and supporting injury prevention.

The Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE) received funding from the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety to conduct the 2022 statewide seatbelt survey.  IPRCE will be sending observers into select counties in Georgia to observe seat belt, child restraint, and motorcycle helmet use as well as driver cell phone use.  Results of this survey will be used to assess progress on Georgia’s work to reduce death and injury in motor-vehicle crashes by increase rates of restraint use.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded $4.2 million over the next five years to fund the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE), a center designed to reduce the top causes of injury and injury death in Georgia and the Southeast through research, education and outreach. IPRCE is one of nine centers in the U.S. being funded by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control under the Injury Control Research Center program.

Dr. Nick Sterling (second-year resident in the Emory Emergency Medicine) and Dr. Justin Schrager (EM Attending) are collaboration on multiple research projects using machine learning and natural language processing of free-form text in electronic medical records data. The team recently published a study, "Prediction of emergency department patient disposition based on natural language processing of triage notes," in the International Journal of Machine Learning, demonstrating the use of natural language processing on nursing triage notes to predict patient hospital disposition at the time of initial emergency department triage.

We are looking for color vision deficient Emergency Medicine providers to test the feasibility of wearing EnChroma glasses, glasses that are designed to improve color vision for color vision deficient people. The tests will evaluate any subjective effect that they have on patient care. This study has been approved by the Emory IRB (Grady review is pending). Only open to Emory providers.

The Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory (IPRCE) and the Medical College of Wisconsin were recently awarded a study to develop and pilot test methods for pedestrian motor-vehicle crash investigations (Jonathan Rupp, PI).  Funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as part of it's Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN), the team’s work will provide the foundation for a future, national study of the vehicle, behavioral, and environmental factors influencing the occurrence of pedestrian motor-vehicle crashes and pedestrian injury in such crashes. 

The Stroke Hyperglycemia Insulin Network Effort (SHINE) Trial was an NIH funded clinical trial that started in 2011. GMH and EUH were clinical participating sites as apart of the Neurological Emergency Treatment Trials (NETT) network. The NETT Hub at Emory was awarded to David Wright, MD and SHINE was overseen by Vishal Patel, MD. Hyperglycemia is common in acute stroke patients. The SHINE trial compared intensive early management of glucose (80-130 mg/dL) to standard care.