The Texas Death Violent Reporting System (TVDRS) within the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) will collect and analyze violent death surveillance data. The program will use existing Medical Examiner (ME), Law Enforcement (LE), Justice of the Peace (JP), and stakeholder infrastructure and collaborations to meet the four main grant objectives: improved violent death surveillance data completeness, quality, and timeliness; stronger key partner relationships; increased data access by the public and partners to inform violent prevention, programmatic, and policy decisions; and increased ability to describe the violent death geographic distribution and understand the social determinants of health in relation to violent death-related health disparities.
TVDRS will implement CDC’s Notice of Funding Opportunity Option Two of the data collection strategies to collect Texas violent death data. A phased approach will allow TVDRS to build the needed infrastructure to collect data on more than 6,000 violent deaths a year. In 2023, TVDRS will collect data from 13 counties to cover approximately 60% of violent deaths. These 13 counties are: Collin, Dallas, Bexar, Bell, Nueces, Williamson, Fort Bend, Tarrant, Denton, El Paso, Travis, Harris, and Montgomery. To collect 70% of violent deaths for the 2024 death cohort, TVDRS will add nine additional counties: Hidalgo, Galveston, Lubbock, Brazoria, Jefferson, McLennan, Smith, Comal, and Midland. By 2025, TVDRS will build the needed infrastructure to collect 100% of Texas violent deaths.
At the end of the grant cycle, TVDRS will have a statewide data collection system which includes appropriate infrastructure, resources, and staffing to collect all Texas violent death information. DSHS is home to the state’s Vital Statistics Section (VSS). VSS sends death certificate files to TVDRS monthly. These death certificate files include all deaths that meet the CDC’s violent death case definition, including homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths due to firearms. TVDRS will initiate death certificate data in SAMS no later than three months from the date of death, and ME, LE, and JP reports will be entered no later than 16 months from the end of a death year. MEs, LEs, and JPs will submit records to TVDRS through secure solutions such as encrypted email, Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and GlobalScape. GlobalScape is a web-based electronic secure file transfer site that allows agencies to send large amounts of data and reports at once. Once TVDRS receives several complete data years, the team will report on violent death trends and make data available through an optional data dashboard. TVDRS will build epidemiologic science and geocoding capacity and conduct social determinants of health data linkage to conduct analyses and construct the optional data dashboard. This optional data dashboard will allow violence prevention partners and the public to view violent death data and show trends over time. TVDRS understands the importance of geocoding to describe the geographic violent death distribution in Texas.