Data That Saves Lives

‍About: The Oklahoma Department of Transportation and the Oklahoma Highway Safety Office jointly oversee statewide roadway safety planning, engineering analysis, and federal reporting across Oklahoma’s diverse network of urban, rural, and tribal jurisdictions. To access federal safety funding through programs such as the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), the agencies must produce defensible, repeatable safety analyses across decades of crash history—work that is traditionally slow and resource-intensive when data must be manually compiled, reconciled, and validated from disparate systems. Safety professionals across the state rrequire timely and accurate data to accelerate funding justification and focus resources on proactive, newly data-defined safety projects.

Challenge: For decades, Oklahoma’s crash records were scattered across five disconnected datasets, representing 28 years and more than 2.2 million crashes–handwritten reports, image files, legacy digitized records, modern e-crash submissions, and supplemental datasets—that had never been successfully fused since reporting began, resulting in major inconsistencies and more than 140,000 duplicate records. This resulted in laborious and time-consuming internal processes. All fatal and serious injury reviews required manual inspection; HSIP evaluation took weeks; and public transparency and inter-agency coordination became exceedingly difficult for staff. 

Solution: Oklahoma partnered with Citian to unify crash data that had been spread across five disconnected sources. Using CRASH’s AI-driven ingestion and refinement engine, Citian digitized paper reports, extracted data from images, reconciled conflicting entries, and eliminated duplicates, giving the state its first clean, fused, authoritative crash database. This new, single source of truth allows for advanced, automated safety analysis, including automated HSM-based evaluations, predictive risk modeling, and countermeasure effectiveness assessment.This unified database allows real-time data sharing across public works, police, and planning departments statewide, creating major efficiency gains and improving inter-agency transparency and coordination - powering long-term, proactive safety strategies.