A new dashboard developed by the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention aims to provide more relevant data to public health and public safety officials across the state.
The Michigan Firearm Injury Near Real-Time data system, or Mi-FINDS, was funded by the institute and the state of Michigan.
Publicly accessible data on the dashboard shows firearm fatalities at the county and state levels.
Authorized users, including public health and public safety professionals, have access to even more precise data. These users can access nearly real-time data including the date of the incident, demographic information, and precise location data. They can also use the dashboard to help visual the data and view trends both by location and by time.
“The idea is we want this data to be as useful as possible to the people who could use it. We would like to eliminate barriers to their work that timely data can help alleviate,” according to Jason Goldstick, director of statistics and methods at the institute.
The data used by the dashboard is obtained through a combination of data from the Medicolegal Death Investigation Log and information provided by individual county medical examiners. The project team gets daily incident data from more than 47 counties. Goldstick said cooperation with medical examiners across the state highlights the importance of collaboration for the project’s success.
“This requires having partnerships with individual offices and asking them to share their data with us on mortality records, when they happened, where they happened,” he said. “The core data for this system is using those records and then figuring out which ones are firearm-injury related and entering them and abstracting the data and entering it into our system.”
Currently, data about firearm-related injuries and deaths comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This data is only available at the county level, and is provided about 18 months after incidents are reported.
“We are doing this work to eliminate barriers that violence prevention workers have that data can address,” Goldstick said. “And therefore, we want violence-prevention workers to use the system. We want their feedback, and we want to use that to improve the system.”
