# CE-22-008 Using Data Linkage to Understand Suicide Attempts, Self-Harm and Unintentional Drowning Deaths

> **NIH ALLCDC U01** · SEATTLE-KING COUNTY PUBLIC HEALTH DEPT · 2024 · $349,999

## Abstract

New Opportunities for Health and Resilience Measures for Suicide (NO HARMS)
Prevention
Project Summary / Abstract
Suicide is an urgent public health problem, nationally and in King County, Washington, requiring
comprehensive, cross-sector approaches for effective prevention. Siloed data across death,
emergency and crisis services, sociodemographic characteristics, intentional self-harm,
inpatient/outpatient services, behavioral and physical health care, and the criminal legal system
hinder a population-level understanding of risk and protective factors and points of intervention.
Lagged data and non-standard definitions limit the ability to systematically link, process, and
analyze data rapidly and accurately. To advance proactive suicide monitoring, research, and
local public health action, Public Health Seattle King County investigators propose the novel and
innovative New Opportunities for Health and Resilience Measures for Suicide (NO HARMS)
Prevention project, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), local subject
matter experts, program administrators, and cross-sector data owners. We will link seven new
data sets to cross-sector person-level data from King County’s Integrated Data Hub (IDH),
construct data elements, then analyze these data to examine risk and protective factors and
system touchpoints, relevant to a comprehensive understanding of suicide and intentional self-
harm. Aim 1 develops a data linkage and quality assurance process to develop a ‘living’ data
resource comprised of 12 cross-sector and seven areal-level data sources to individual records.
This aim will build on IDH’s established protocols for probabilistic and deterministic data linkage.
Aim 2 defines and constructs data elements related to individual, relational, and community-
level risk and protective factors, system touchpoints, individual contextual information related to
suicide and intentional self-harm, utilizing the integrated administrative data and consensus-
based processes. Natural Language Processing methods applied to underexamined text fields
and multi-level cross-sector data linkages will result in a rich data source. Aim 3 uses the novel
NO HARMS Prevention data resource for monitoring, evaluation, and research by developing
an interactive dashboard visualizing descriptive findings and conducting inferential analyses of
risk and protective factors related to suicide and intentional self-harm. We will discover how risk
and protective factors cluster in our population into unique risk profiles through latent class
analysis. Using data spanning nearly a decade, we will also apply a case-control design to
rigorously examine associations between risk and protective factors and intentional self-harm.
As the first-ever data linkage effort of its kind, NO HARMS Prevention will advance the science
and practice of suicide prevention and will be a replicable model for other jurisdictions.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10827489
- **Project number:** 5U01CE003503-03
- **Recipient organization:** SEATTLE-KING COUNTY PUBLIC HEALTH DEPT
- **Principal Investigator:** Alastair Matheson
- **Activity code:** U01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** ALLCDC
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $349,999
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-30 → 2025-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10827489

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10827489, CE-22-008 Using Data Linkage to Understand Suicide Attempts, Self-Harm and Unintentional Drowning Deaths (5U01CE003503-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10827489. Licensed CC0.

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