Note that figures by race primarily for residents of Appling county are invalid due to Appling Healthcare System race reporting.
On 12/05/2019 re-geocoded data were posted to correct an error in sub-county geographies that affected certain counties. County-level counts did not change.
If querying all "External Causes" or the subcategory "Falls" within the External Causes category, there is an undercount in these events in Discharge data for year 2009 only. This undercount primarily affects residents of DeKalb, Fulton, and Cobb counties, and is most pronounced in ages 0-19.
Please note that Hart County Hospital closed July 1st, 2012 but did not report any data for 2012. Numbers may be artificially deflated for Hart and surrounding counties.
Candler County experienced a significant drop in Hospital Discharges due to non-reporting. Residents of Bulloch, Evans, Emanuel and Tattnall counties were also slightly affected.
“Mental and Behavioral Disorders” were underreported primarily for residents of Clayton and Spalding counties. Residents of Fulton, DeKalb, and Fayette were affected to a lesser degree.
Effective October 1, 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services required health care organizations and providers to use the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) to code medical encounters in the hospital and emergency department settings. This transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM caused the data for certain categories to require additional processing, or appear to be out of trend. Please see the Definitions page for further detail. Note: Due to evolving ICD10 standards, adjustments were made to some 2015 (4th quarter) records on 12/18/17.
Due to ICD10-CM coding rules being more widely adopted, there are some significant changes in certain disease categories.
While the total for the Major Cardiovascular Diseases category remains consistent with previous years, Hypertensive Heart Disease shows a 10-fold increase since ICD10-CM came into adoption, and High Blood Pressure drops by half.
A similar situation exists for Respiratory Diseases: Respiratory Distress of Newborn and All other Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases show large increases.
Other categories seeing increases include Infections Specific to the Perinatal Period (7-fold increase) and Accidental Discharge of Firearms (2-fold increase).
If querying Ethnicity there is an undercount in Discharge data for year 2016 and beyond due to several facilities not capturing Ethnicity. Overall ~9% of all discharges did not report Ethnicity. Generally, use caution when looking at any rates and numbers by Hispanic Ethnicity. Data prior to 2016 are either too unreliable or not available.
On 7.22.2021 the NCHS Rankable Cause “Influenza and Pneumonia” was updated to include ICD10 code J09 to reflect evolving standards from NCHS.
SIDS data were accidentally inflated during the period 1/25/23 – 3/3/23.
On 10/22/24, an update was made that increased the count of Accidental Drowning and Submersion by 31 in Discharge and 173 in ER visit data. This also had the effect of lowering select other external causes by a miniscule amount.
Content Version 10/22/2024