Information about nonfatal injuries comes from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development Patient Discharge Data. The data set contains information on patients discharged from all non-Federal hospitals in California. EPIC uses this data to describe people who are hospitalized as a result of an injury (that is, whose discharge diagnosis includes an external cause of injury (E-Code)).

Cases represent the first hospitalization for the injury in question, but may not be the only record for an individual person. Repeat visits for the same injury are not included in the file so each record represents an incident injury event. However a person unfortunate enough to have two separate hospitalizations for injuries would be counted twice.

Tables we present using patient discharge data include only nonfatal discharges. This means that if you look at the count of both hospitalizations and deaths, the same individual would not be counted twice. As in death data, we exclude cases with iatrogenic codes (adverse effects of medical care and drugs). We also exclude cases with unknown age, newborns, and records erroneously listing a "place of injury" code (E849.0-E849.9) as the primary E-Code. Our final exclusion is that we remove the small number of records with extreme ages (greater than 109 years) because we suspect there may be some erroneous values in these extreme cases.

Unlike deaths, hospitalizations are not coded using ICD-10 and likely will not be for several years.

Additional Help

If these pages don't answer your questions, or if you need help interpreting data you got from this site, e-mail us at epic@dhs.ca.gov.