Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 17, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266097
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of California, Los Angeles
- the Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Academic Affiliations through the VA/National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of California, Los Angeles
- Department of Emergency Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study retrospectively reviewed patient data from January 1, 2014 to May 14, 2020 in the greater Los Angeles area to investigate e-scooter injuries and estimate the injury rate. The study found that there were 115 injuries per million e-scooter trips treated in the healthcare system. Additionally, the study revealed that 30% of patients required treatment in multiple clinical settings and 29% required advanced imaging.
BackgroundShareable e-scooters have become popular, but injuries to riders and bystanders have not been well characterized. The goal of this study was to describe e-scooter injuries and estimate the rate of injury per e-scooter trip. Methods and findingsRetrospective review of patients presenting to 180 clinics and 2 hospitals in greater Los Angeles between January 1, 2014 and May 14, 2020. Injuries were identified using a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm not previously used to identify injuries, tallied, and described along with required healthcare resources. We combine these tallies with municipal data on scooter use to report a monthly utilization-corrected rate of e-scooter injuries. We searched 36 million clinical notes. Our NLP algorithm correctly classified 92% of notes in the testing set compared with the gold standard of investigator review. In total, we identified 1,354 people injured by e-scooters; 30% were seen in more than one clinical setting (e.g., emergency department and a follow-up outpatient visit), 29% required advanced imaging, 6% required inpatient admission, and 2 died. We estimate 115 injuries per million e-scooter trips were treated in our health system. ConclusionsOur observed e-scooter injury rate is likely an underestimate, but is similar to that previously reported for motorcycles. However, the comparative severity of injuries is unknown. Our methodology may prove useful to study other clinical conditions not identifiable by existing diagnostic systems.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available