In Maryland a staff member of the state Office of the Chief Medical
Examiner, which is what "the coroner's office" is called here, searched the
records for how many bee sting deaths had occurred and published the number
as part of a larger report. She looked at "cause of death" on the death
certificate. I called her, and asked, "What standards do you have to
insure that it was a bee sting and not, for example, a wasp." She said
none and she said, "Maybe I should have said 'insect stings.'"
marc hoffman
On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Blair Christian <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> In response to:
>
> >No one reports or tracks this
> >factoid, but the near 100% digitization of emergency room records >makes
> this a pretty easy thing to "go count", as the data on stingers >would not
> seem to be confidential HIPPA restricted data.
>
> I just thought I would weigh in here and say that I had to laugh out loud
> when I read "pretty easy thing". I'll just say that hospital medical
> records in he US were never created to be searchable or to create
> aggregated medical record data for analysis. Even worse, some hospitals (in
> the digital age) have entirely different ER and primary care medical record
> systems. And even worse, hospitals can have to pay fees to access their own
> data (eg it used to be $30k/yr for hospitals to license the data access
> module for Epic's EHR data).
>
> To get constructive though, your best bet would be to look through the
> ambulatory data:
> http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ahcd.htm
> or mortality data:
> http://wonder.cdc.gov/
> to find the accident/death data relating to bee stings.
>
> The best data here in the US is the hospital billing data which typically
> uses ICD codes or bundles of them. Also, one of changes that should show up
> when the US transitions from ICD-9 to ICD-10 this year is that instead of
> having one category for insect stings (
> http://www.icd9data.com/2015/Volume1/800-999/980-989/989/989.5.htm ), we
> will much more detailed data about bee stings, and can even separate the
> masochists (self inflicted bee stings) from the innocent (accidental bee
> stings) (http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/S00-T88/T51-T65/T63/T63.4-
> )
> . Although I admit that I am confused by "T63.443
> <http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/S00-T88/T51-T65/T63/T63.4-/T63.443
> >
> Toxic
> effect of venom of bees, assault". Is that assault with venomous bees?
>
> For more information on medical record data, you might find this helpful
> and amusing:
> http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/the-16-most-absurd-icd-10-codes/285737/
>
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