Trauma accounts for 199 800 deaths and 30.9 million nonfatal injuries in the United States each year. 1 Among survivors, the long-term consequences can be devastating in terms of both medical considerations, such as risk of readmission and need for rehabilitation, and patients' lived experience, affecting functional outcomes and health-related quality of life. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that in 2010, estimated annual lifetime costs due to trauma totaled more than $187 billion (an average of $1.05 million per person), of which 98.9% ($1.04 million per person) was due to loss of work alone. 1 Recent work by the National Institutes of Health and American College of Surgeons recognized this issue, calling for a need to consider longer-term outcomes of care and to implement patientcentered methods to collect postdischarge outcomes in existing trauma registries. 2 Consensus statements from Europe tell a similar story. 3 Nevertheless, despite widespread recognition, there remains a paucity of data concerning the postdischarge experience of trauma patients, particularly as it pertains to patient-centered outcomes. On a national scale, it is not known what information is being collected.As the largest trauma registry in the world collected in accordance with the US National Trauma Data Standard, the National Trauma Database provides a national repository of information on trauma care. In 2014, it collected data on more than 861 300 patient encounters and 724 trauma centers across the United States. The National Trauma Database has helped to inform stakeholders about the experience of injured patients in the acute care setting with an impact that, like other trauma registries throughout the world, traverses "epidemiology, prevention, monitoring and benchmarking, and quality improvement," among other uses. 4 It does not, however, collect information on events or outcomes following discharge from the emergency department or inpatient care-neither does the National Inpatient Sample.To assess the current status of postdischarge data collection in trauma registries, we conducted an internetbased systematic search of all 50 US states and the District of Columbia Department of Public Health (Emergency Medical Services) websites with the objective of identifying trauma registry data dictionaries and statewide trauma reports. In states where trauma registries are collected, existing information was queried for the inclusion of postdischarge outcomes, including what information is collected, for whom, and over what time span. Telephone requests for data dictionaries were made when they were not available online. Fortyseven of 51 states/regions had a statewide trauma registry (Table ).
