Medical nomenclature and common conventions for trauma registries.

A trauma registry has been created containing lexicons of terms arranged to foster the adoption of standardized and extensible terminology for the nature and mode of injury. Identification of attribute sets for the nature-of-injury (body region:detailed part:type of injury) and for the mode-of-injury (mechanism:agent:activity:intent:setting) allows the assembly of a clear, concise, easily usable, nad extensible format for representing the appropriate level of detail for nomenclature or classification. This ability allows the use of a common list of terms that is adaptable for case records used in patient care as well as in trauma registry statistics. Several examples of reports using these attributes are shown.