Costs of Injuries Resulting from Motorcycle Crashes:
A Literature Review
Appendix F
Glossary

Table of Contents / NHTSA home / Appendix E

AIS
Abbreviated Injury Scale. AIS scores describe the severity of injury on a scale of 0 (no injury) to 6 (unsurvivable) for each of nine body regions (head, face, neck, chest, thorax, abdomen and pelvic contents, spine, upper extremity, lower extremity, and external, burns, and other).

DRG
Diagnosis-related group. A diagnosis grouping system used by HCFA. It includes about 500 diagnosis groups.

E-code
ICD-9 external cause of injury and poisoning. Used in many datasets to record events, circumstances, or conditions that caused or contributed to the occurrence of an injury. E-codes in the range E810-E819 identify motor vehicle traffic accidents, and those in the range E820-E825 identify motor vehicle nontraffic accidents. In these ranges, the fourth digit identifies the injured person: .2 identifies a motorcyclist, and .3 identifies a passenger on motorcycle. For this purpose, ICD-9 defines a motorcycle thus:

A motorcycle is a two-wheeled motor vehicle having one or two riding saddles and sometimes having a third wheel for the support of a sidecar. The sidecar is considered part of the motorcycle.

Includes: motorized:

bicycle [moped]
scooter
tricycle
FARS
Fatality Analysis Reporting System.

GCS
Glasgow Coma Scale. A measure of consiouness impairment and coma based on a sum of eye, verbal, and motor components. The scale ranges from 15(normal) to 3(severe brain damage).

GES
General Estimates System. A national probability sample of police-reported crashes.

ICD-9-CM
International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification. The standard system for recording medical diagnoses and procedures in hospital records. It includes coding systems for classifying diseases and injuries (formerly called N-codes), miscellaneous factors (V-codes), external cause of injury and poisoning (E-codes, see above), and procedures.

ISS
Injury Severity Score. A measure of overall injury severity calculated by summing the squares of the AIS (see above) scores for each of the three most severely injured ISS body regions (head/neck, face, chest, abdomen and pelvic contents, extremities or pelvic girdle, and external).

KABCO
An injury severity scale used by police in crash reports. The acronym lists the five values in the scale from most severe to least severe: K, killed; A, disabling injury; B, evident injury; C, possible injury; and O, no apparent injury.

Medical costs
The ultimate cost to society for all treatments administered to a patient as a result of an illness or injury. This includes the costs of emergency transport to a hospital or other treatment facility, examination and treatment in an emergency room, all hospital stays if admitted, physician and other professional care, medicine and medical equipment (e.g., crutches), follow-up visits, and home care. Where applicable, medical costs also include rehabilitation expenses and long-term care in a nursing facility. The exact, full medical costs resulting from an injury or illness are not normally available to researchers. Hospital charges, which are often used as a proxy for medical costs, capture only the portion of medical care administered in a hospital on the initial visit - i.e., emergency room treatment and the initial hospital stay. Moreover, hospital charges overstate actual hospital costs. Hospitals typically charge about twice their actual costs, anticipating the discounts negotiated by most payers (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, insurance companies, HMOs). Therefore, when used as a cost surrogate, hospital charges tend to overstate the costs of most injuries, which are relatively minor, while understating the costs of catastrophic injuries requiring long-term treatment after discharge from the hospital.

VMT
Vehicle miles traveled. The favored measure of driver exposure in principle, but rarely available in practice.