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Note: This page is intended to help you answer questions about using our custom table
builders. If you are looking for general information about our data sources and how EPIC
defines injuries, return to our main help page and select the appropriate link
under "About our data sources".
If you still have questions about using the custom table builders or The EPICenter web site,
please e-mail EPIC.
The Basics
Year
Select the start and end years of the range you are interested in. To look at just one year in
particular, select that year for both the start and end year (i.e. selecting 1994 through 1994 will
look only at 1994 data). Be sure the end year is the same year or a later year than your starting
year. The default value is the most current year of data we have available.
Cause
If you are interested in a particular type of injury, select that type here. The default
selection is "All injuries", which means you will be looking at all deaths or
hospitalizations due to injuries. We also offer the ability to select all injuries of a specific
intent ("All unintentional injuries", "All self-inflicted injuries", and
"All assault injuries"). Finally, you can narrow your focus to a specific injury type, or
even several different causes of injury. On a PC, you can select multiple causes by holding
down the Control button and clicking on the causes you are interested in. On a Macintosh, use the
Command key instead of the Control key.
County of residence
This field is simply the county of residence of the injured person. It is not safe to assume that
this is the county where the injury occurred. Selecting one or more counties here will narrow
the number of cases you are looking at. You can also select county of residence as an
additional level of detail (see below) if you want to compare the number of injuries in different
counties.
Age
If you want to look at all ages, make sure the "All ages" button is selected. The
default value is to look at all ages.If you want to narrow your query to a specific age range, type
the starting and ending ages for your age group in the appropriate boxes. To look at a single year
of age, such as only 4 year-olds, enter the same value in both boxes (i.e. enter "From 4
through 4". To include those that are less than 1 year old, enter "0". If
you want to look at everyone over a specific age, say 65, specify "From 65 through 120
years old".
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Advanced Cause
This option allows you to select specific individual cause of injury codes. For example, if
"falls" is too general, you might select an ICD code for a specific type of fall
such as from a ladder or scaffold. This option can be tricky. If you're unsure about the
results you are getting, contact us by email or phone (916-552-9800) and we'll be happy to help or
double check your results.
When using this box, enter the codes you want separated by commas or spaces. For ICD-9 codes, do
not include the leading "E", but with ICD-10 codes, do include the "V",
"W", "X", or "Y". You cannot enter a range (810-819 or V80-V89); you
must enter each specific code. Be sure to include the appropriate number of digits - some codes
are only 3 digits (such as 896 or W20) while others may be 4 or 5 digits (such as 9001 or
V500). If you enter fewer digits than required, you will get unpredictable results. To look up
ICD codes we recommend you use a hard copy ICD manual. You may be able to find an online ICD
lookup, but check that what you find is current (ICD coding does change a little bit each year), and
it will be difficult to find ICD-10 codes online.
Sometimes an easier way to get information about specific causes is to select the general
category in which you are interested using the "Cause" category selector above and then
under Additional Detail below, select "Cause of Injury (ICD9/ICD10 codes)". This
gives you a count of the number of cases with each specific ICD codes that comprise that category.
This way you don't have to worry about exactly how to enter the codes.
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Additional Detail (Using This Area is Optional)
Selecting levels of detail
These are optional fields that let you get more detailed information about the injury cases you
selected above. For example, if you wanted to know the number of suicides there are among
males versus females, you would select "All self-inflicted injuries" as the cause and then
select "Sex" as a detail variable in this optional area. You do not need to use these
fields unless you want further details about the injuries you are looking at. You can use just one
field or all four depending upon how much detail you think you need. The only rule is that you need
to use them in order (first, then second, then third, then fourth.).
Using these options, you can create huge tables, so this site doesn't create "RxC"
tables where you have one variable across the top and another down the side. Instead, all the
variables will be listed down the side next to each other. All the same information is there, and
with some creative cutting and pasting (tip: try pasting the data "transposed" in Excel)
you can create an "RxC" table if that is what you need. Even if you create a massive
table, the output will fit across the page and will instead be very long rather than wide. The first
variable you select will be the first grouping created and the second variable will be listed as
sub-levels of each level of the first variable. The example below shows what you might get if you
select Sex as the first level and Year as the second Level (assuming you had selected only the years
1999-2000).
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Variables Available in the Fatal Table Builder
Age (3 different formats)
You can select the age of the victim at the time of death in three different formats. Please note
that if you have selected a specific age range in the boxes above, you will not be able to use the
EPIC or 5-year age groupings. Also, if you select different formats for age in the different boxes,
you will get unpredictable results. · Single year of age: Each year of age will appear on it's own
line (for example: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 … all the way to the maximum age) · EPIC age: These are
categories we've use in many of our publications: <1, 1-4, 5-12, 13-15, 16-20, 21-44, 45-64, and
65+ · 5-year age groups: These start with "0-4" and go to "104-109". Persons
over 109 years old are included in the category "110+".
County of residence
This field is simply the county of residence of the injured person. It is not safe to assume that
this is the county where the injury occurred.
Education
This is the highest level of education completed. They are recorded on the death certificate as
the number of years completed and we have grouped those values into the categories: Less than High
School (0-11 years); High School (12 years); More than High School (13 or more years); Unknown
(unknown and/or not reported on death certificate). Most researchers only look at persons 25
and older to exclude those people who are still going to shool.
Race/Ethnicity
We combine two separate fields, race and Hispanic ethnicity, into a single race/ethnicity
field. We also combine some levels of detail (such as combining Asian sub-groups into a single
"Asian" category). We do this so that we have comparable groups both across time and
between fatal and nonfatal data. Both of those source data sets have different levels of
detail. If you need more detail than we've provided, contact us and we can discuss what we
have available in our data.
Sex
This is simply the sex of the injured person.
Year
This is the year of death.
Cause (2 different formats)
This is the injury event that is coded as the underlying cause of death on the death certificate.
You can break down the cause of injury into either groups/topics (e.g. "Unintentional -
Fall", "Suicide - Poisoning", "Assault - Firearm") or by ICD9/10 codes
(E-Codes and V, W, X, Y codes). Data from 1999 and later use ICD-10 codes while earlier years use
ICD-9. Use caution in comparing causes across time as the coding systems are different and not all
definitions are compatible across time (particularly transportation-related injuries). Keep in mind
that the EPIC groups are similar to, but not identical to injury definitions used by CDC and other
injury researchers.
- More information on comparing our numbers to CDC (link coming soon)
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Variables Available in the Nonfatal Table Builder
Age (3 different formats)
You can select the age of the victim at the time of death in three different formats. Please note
that if you have selected a specific age range in the boxes above, you will not be able to use the
EPIC or 5-year age groupings. Also, if you select different formats for age in the different boxes,
you will get unpredictable results. · Single year of age: Each year of age will appear on it's own
line (for example: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 … all the way to the maximum age) · EPIC age: These are
categories we've use in many of our publications: <1, 1-4, 5-12, 13-15, 16-20, 21-44, 45-64, and
65+ · 5-year age groups: These start with "0-4" and go to "104-109". Persons
over 109 years old are included in the category "110+"
County of residence
This field is simply the county of residence of the injured person. It is not safe to assume that
this is the county where the injury occurred.
Expected Source of Payment
The expected source of payment is the type of payer that is expected to pay or did pay the
greatest portion of the bill for the hospital stay.
Length of Stay
This is the number of days the patient was hospitalized length of stay in days. If the patient
was admitted and discharged on the same day, the length is listed as zero.
Race/Ethnicity
We combine two separate fields, race and Hispanic ethnicity, into a single race/ethnicity
field. We also combine some levels of detail (such as combining Asian sub-groups into a single
"Asian" category). We do this so that we have comparable groups both across time and
between fatal and nonfatal data. Both of those source data sets have different levels of
detail. If you need more detail than we've provided, contact us and we can discuss what we
have available in our data.
Sex
This is simply the sex of the injured person.
Year
This is the year of discharge from the hospital.
Cause (2 different formats)
You can break down the cause of injury into either groups/topics (e.g. "Unintentional -
Fall", "Suicide - Poisoning", "Assault - Firearm") or by ICD9/10 codes
(E-Codes and VWXY codes). All years of hospitalization data use ICD-9 coding. Be aware that death
data from 1999 and later use ICD-10 codes while earlier years use ICD-9. Because of this coding
difference, use caution in comparing hospitalizations to deaths in 1999 and later as the coding
systems are different and not all definitions are compatible (particularly transportation-related
injuries). Keep in mind that the EPIC groups are similar to, but not identical to injury definitions
used by CDC and other injury researchers.
- More information on comparing our numbers to CDC (link coming soon)
Primary Diagnosis (2 different formats)
The Primary Diagnosis code is one of 20 diagnosis fields in the hospital discharge data
set. The primary or principal diagnosis is the diagnosis that is the chief reason the patient
was admitted to the hospital. The principal diagnosis may be the patient's most serious
problem, but sometimes it is not.
We have formatted this diagnosis field in two ways. First is "Nature of injury"
and second is the "Part of body injured". The nature is the type of injury (such as
burn, fracture, or open wound). The part of body groupings include the general region of the
body injured (such as lower extremity, torso, or vertebral column).
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Output Options
You have three different output types to choose from. Each has strengths and weaknesses that are
discussed in more detail below. HTML will be fastest output to create so you may choose to work with
that until you get just the results you want, then select a different output format. The default
selection is HTML format.
HTML (good for viewing online)
Selecting HTML means your table will come back as a web page. This is great for viewing online
and okay for printing small tables that will fit on a single sheet of paper.
Bonus tip: HTML tables are also easy to copy and
paste into your favorite spreadsheet or word processing program. Just use your mouse to highlight
the title and table body (or use "Select All") and then copy the selected text. Go to your
spreadsheet or text document and paste. After pasting into the other program, you can remove or
clear the formatting so that it looks a little neater. You can also resize the text, change the font
and colors and/or adjust the cell sizes as needed to fit with your document.
PDF (good for printing)
To view PDF documents, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. This
format will be a little more compact than the other formats and has better control over where page
breaks fall so this is the best format to use for printing. On some computers we've found that PDF
files generated by this site do not always work even though other PDF files open just fine. We hope
future upgrades will alleviate this problem. In the interim, you can either change your outputs
format to HTML or RTF or try changing settings in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
- How to change your Acrobat Reader settings (link coming soon)
RTF (good for using in a word processor)
Be aware that RTF output is designed for use with Microsoft Word and opening it in other word
processors such as Word Perfect may not offer acceptable quality output. You'll notice that when you
use RTF, the titles and footnotes appear in the document header and footer rather than as text next
to the table itself. If you prefer not to have this type of output, see the "Bonus tip"
above about how to use HTML output in your word processing document.
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