KDHE Home - News 2002 - News Release
Kansas
Department of Health & Environment
Bill Graves, Governor
Clyde D. Graeber, Secretary
For Immediate Release
December 30, 2002
Contact: Sharon Watson, 785-296-5795
The public and researchers seeking summary death statistics now have an updated query tool. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment Center for Health and Environmental Statistics posted the new query tool to its Kansas Information for Communities (KIC) website at http://kic.kdhe.state.ks.us/kic/. Users will now be able to construct queries using the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision (ICD-10).
The new mortality query tool has two levels of detail instead of the three associated with the previous version. The first level of detail, the one users will see when they first create a query, contains a modified list of the 39 Selected Causes of Death, as defined by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The second level of detail closely follows the 113 Selected Causes of Death list from NCHS, and can be selected by clicking the hyperlinked cause of death.
The Center for Health and Environmental Statistics began coding deaths under ICD-10 in 1999. The center modified the KIC system since pre-1999 deaths, coded to ICD-9, would be incompatible with current data.
KIC features include the ability to select data by county or zip code and create data tables. County results may also be displayed in a map layout.
Other selections include, race, sex, year and age-group. Individual causes or groups of causes may be selected for the query.
KIC users are cautioned about making comparisons of mortality data before 1999 to current data. The KIC tool, because of its design, does not incorporate the use of a comparability ratio created by NCHS for the specific purpose of comparing mortality rates between 1998 and 1999. While most of the comparability ratios are less than five percent, some causes of death had greater ratios and KIC results would not take that into account. For more information on the application of comparability ratios and a comparison of mortality rates between the ICD revisions, users can go to http://www.kdheks.gov/ches/icd9-10.pdf.
The new lists of mortality cause groups are the same used by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (MDOHSS), which operates the Missouri Information for Community Assessment (MICA) health data query system for that state. Mortality queries based on one of the listed causes of death will return results with like-coded deaths in either state.
MDOHSS staff developed the core KIC programming. KIC is supported in part by project U93 MC00139-03 as a Special Project of Regional and National Significance (SPRANS), Title V (as amended), Social Security Act, administered by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration, United States Department of Health and Human Services.