EpiCenter - Help with Building Tables
This webpage provides assistance on how to develop
tables using the different types of data queries on our web-based
system, EpiCenter. These data queries include Overall Injury Surveillance, Injury Data Summaries, Selected Injury Topics, Suicide Surveillance, and Population Data.
Overall Injury Surveillance
To build a table, select from these
options:
Outcome
Select either "Death", "Non-fatal Hospitalization", or
"Non-fatal Emergency Department Visits". These all indicate the outcome or
health care utilization the injury resulted in.
Rates
User can check the "Show crude rates" checkbox to get rates per
100,000 incidents based on California population data from the California
Department of Finance (DOF). Rates are not displayed in the output if there are
fewer than 20 cases available, because rates generated from small numbers
may not be reliable. Population data may not be available to
produce rates for all categories listed in the output
(selected under "Additional Detail").
Due to differences in how race/ethnicity is classified in the
population and injury data, caution should be used when interpreting rates
involving race/ethnicity. When rates and race/ethnicity are
selected, the output will omit the DOF's "Multirace" category since this is not
a category in the injury data, and will include "Unknown" and
"Other" in the "White" category since this corresponds to how race/ethnicity is
categorized in the DOF population data. For more information on
how the race/ethnicity categories vary and affect the rate calculations, please
see our About
our Data page.
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 2000 through 2000 will look only at 2000
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.
County of Residence
This field is 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. The default
selection is "California", to give data for the whole state. You can select
multiple counties by holding down the "CTRL" key on your keyboard (or "Mac" key
for Mac users).
Race/Ethnicity
Select from: White, Black, Hispanic, Native American,
Asian/Pacific Islander, and Other/Unknown. You can select
multiple races/ethnicities by holding down the "CTRL" key on your keyboard (or
"Mac" key for Mac users). To find out more about how the Race/Ethnicity is
generated, see our About our
Data page.
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, and remember to click on the button for "Custom
Age Range". 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".
Cause Group
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, emergency department visits, 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. {Use the "Mac" key if you are using a Mac.)
See what ICD-9 and -10
codes are in each injury category
Specific 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 āfrom a ladder or scaffoldā. This
option can be tricky. If you're unsure about the results you are getting,
contact us by email IVPB@cdph.ca.gov or
phone at 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 for
ICD-10 codes, do include the "U", "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 āAdditional Detailā below, select
"Cause of Injury (ICD9/ICD10 codes)". This gives you a count of the number of
cases with each specific ICD code that comprise that category. This way you
don't have to worry about exactly how to enter the codes.
Output Options
You have two 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.
1) 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.
2) PDF (good for
printing)
To view PDF documents, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader
installed on your computer. This format has better control over where page
breaks fall so this is the best format to use for printing.
Additional detail (optional section)
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 "R x C" 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 "R x C" table if that is what you need. 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. See our About our
Data page for more information on specific fields in the Additional Detail
section.
Injury Data Summaries
To build a table, select from these
options:
Outcome
Select either "Death", "Non-fatal Hospitalization", or
"Non-fatal Emergency Department Visits". These all indicate the outcome or
health care utilization the injury resulted in.
Report
Select the type of report you want to look at. There are 4
types of basic reports to view: Injury by Cause and Age, Top Five Causes of
Injury, Injury Trends with Frequencies (which gives you the counts of injuries
throughout the years), and Injury Trends with Rates (which calculates the rate
of injury using California population data). Tip: If you want to look at more
detailed reports that you can generate your own detail for, please run the
"Overall Injury Surveillance" data query.
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 2000 through 2000 will look only at 2000
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.
County of Residence
This field is 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. The
default selection is "California", to give data for the whole state. You can
select multiple counties by holding down the "CTRL" key on your keyboard (or
"Mac" key for Mac users).
Output Options
You have two 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.
1) 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.
2) PDF (good for
printing)
To view PDF documents, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader
installed on your computer. This format has better control over where page
breaks fall so this is the best format to use for printing.
Selected
Injury Topics
To build a table, select from these
options:
Topic
Select a cause of injury from the list of selected injury
topics. Not all causes of injury are included here; the ones here may be
included because of a specific need or demand, or because of a special project
the Safe and Active Communities Branch has been involved in surrounding that
topic. If you do not see the injury topic you are looking for, please look at
the "Overall Injury Surveillance" query to find what you are looking for.
Outcome
Select either "Death", "Non-fatal Hospitalization", or
"Non-fatal Emergency Department Visits". These all indicate the outcome or
health care utilization the injury resulted in.
County of Residence
This field is 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. The
default selection is "California", to give data for the whole state. You can
select multiple counties by holding down the "CTRL" key on your keyboard (or
"Mac" key for Mac users).
Table
Select the type of table you want to look at. The types vary
depending on what injury topic you select:
- By Age and Sex
- By Age and Race/Ethnicity
- By Age and Year
- By Age and Month-You can only select this for Death data. This differs from the hospitalization and emergency department data because the "day of the week" that the injury occurred is not available in the death data.
- By Age and Month and Day of the Week- You can only select this for hospitalization and emergency department data.
- By Age and Cause/Mechanism - You can only select this if you select an injury topic that includes more specific information on cause within that topic. For example, if you select "Homicide", the "Age by Cause/Mechnism" table will tell you how the homicide occurred (abuse and neglect, unarmed fight, firemarm, etc.).
Suicide Surveillance
To develop tables specific to data on suicide deaths, please refer to this document:
Accessing Statwide Suicide Death Data using EpiCenter (PDF)
Population
Data
To build a table, select from these
options:
County
This field is the county of residence in the Department of Finance's
population data. The default selection is "California", to give data for the
whole state. You can select multiple counties by holding down the "CTRL" key on
your keyboard (or "Mac" key for Mac users). Check the checkbox provided here if
you want to select more than one county, but see the data broken out by each
county. Otherwise, the data for all the counties you select will be
aggregated.
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 2000 through 2000 will look only at 2000
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.The
output will give you each year reported separately in a table.
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, and remember to click on the button for "Custom
Age Range". 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".
Sex
Select "Male" or "Female" for more specific gender information. Default is
"All" which will give you all genders that are in the population data.
Race/Ethnicity
Select from: White/Unknown/Other, Black, Hispanic, Native
American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Multirace. Note that the categories of
race/ethnicity for Population data are different from the categories
for race/ethnicity in our injury data. Also, the California Department of
Finance (DOF) did not start collecting and reporting data on "Multirace" until
2000. Therefore, the population numbers for specific races/ethnicities will
differ quite drastically for years prior to 2000, compared to 2000 and later,
since the population that was "multi-race" would have been categorized as one of
the other races/ethnicites prior to 2000. For this reason, caution must be used
when comparing population numbers or rates for years prior to 2000 and after
2000 when using race/ethnicity. For more information on race/ethnicity
classifications in population data, see About our Data.
Output Options
You have two 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.
1) 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.
2) PDF (good for
printing)
To view PDF documents, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader
installed on your computer. This format has better control over where page
breaks fall so this is the best format to use for printing. āā
For additional help, please email IVPB@cdph.ca.gov or contact us directly at 916-552-9800.