Skip to main content

Medical Examiner

The Office of the Medical Examiner (OME) is a statewide system for investigation of sudden and unexpected death in Utah. OME, in the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), certified over 2000 of the 13,920 deaths in Utah in 2008.

Information from OME death investigations is currently stored in three separate UDOH data silos that have limited interoperability. These three electronic data systems include death certificates, medical examiner investigations, and laboratory results. Without interoperability, OME staff is required to enter the same data into multiple systems. In addition, the process of requesting laboratory analysis and receiving results is paper based, significantly slowing final cause of death determination in a majority of cases.

Epidemiological studies and surveillance activities are hindered by the lack of systems integration in UDOH and often require retrospective data linkage. As an example, in 2005, CDC and the UDOH reported that deaths in Utah caused by drug poisoning from non-illicit drugs had increased fivefold from 1991 to 2003.1 This significant finding relied on retrospective linkage of death certificates, medical examiner records, and toxicology results to describe the problem.

In 2008, funding from a bioterrorism grant from the US Department of Homeland Security was secured to support development of a unique, integrated system for medical examiner and death certificate data.

Objectives

The objectives of the Utah Medical Examiner Database (UMED) project are:

  • To provide a single point of entry for medical examiner pathologists and staff to manage investigation information.
  • To develop an operational system that links death certificate, medical examiner, and laboratory data in real time as a resource for epidemiology and public health surveillance.
Referenced File
Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The Office of the Medical Examiner (OME) is a statewide system for investigation of sudden and unexpected death in Utah. OME, in the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), certified over 2000 of the 13,920 deaths in Utah in 2008. 

Information from OME death investigations is currently stored in three separate UDOH data silos that have limited interoperability. These three electronic data systems include death certificates, medical examiner investigations, and laboratory results. Without interoperability, OME staff is required to enter the same data into multiple systems. In addition, the process of requesting laboratory analysis and receiving results is paper based, significantly slowing final cause of death determination in a majority of cases. 

Epidemiological studies and surveillance activities are hindered by the lack of systems integration in UDOH and often require retrospective data linkage. As an example, in 2005, CDC and the UDOH reported that deaths in Utah caused by drug poisoning from non-illicit drugs had increased fivefold from 1991 to 2003. This significant finding relied on retrospective linkage of death certificates, medical examiner records, and toxicology results to describe the problem.

In 2008, funding from a bioterrorism grant from the US Department of Homeland Security was secured to support development of a unique, integrated system for medical examiner and death certificate data.

 

Objectives

The objectives of the Utah Medical Examiner Database project are: 

  • To provide a single point of entry for medical examiner pathologists and staff to manage investigation information. 
  • To develop an operational system that links death certificate, medical examiner, and laboratory data in real time as a resource for epidemiology and public health surveillance.
Referenced File
Submitted by hparton on

Using death certificates alone to identify contributing substances in drug overdose deaths may result in misclassification and underestimation of the burden of illicit and prescription opioids and other drugs in drug-related deaths. To enable timely and targeted prevention in Tennessee (TN), the identification and monitoring of new drugs and trends in use should utilize toxicology and medicolegal death investigation data directly, as recommended by others 1-3. These data can inform mortality outcome definitions for improved surveillance and risk factor identification 4-7. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis to use statewide linked toxicology and death certificate data in TN.

Objective: To examine specific drugs present based on postmortem toxicology for prescription opioid, heroin, and fentanyl overdoses classified based on ICD-10 coding. To compare drugs identified from postmortem toxicology with those listed on the death certificate for opioid overdoses.

Submitted by elamb on

The rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States has increased steadily since 2000. Injection drug use, a practice associated with infectious disease transmission, has likely increased along with this upward trend in drug overdoses. Injection drug use surveillance is difficult to conduct at a public health department because there are no specific Internal Classification of Diseases codes to identify this risk behavior in hospital discharge or vital registration data. Maricopa County Department of Public Health Office of Epidemiology aimed to identify indications of injection drug use within data from the Office of the Medical Examiner.

Objective: To determine whether data from the Office of the Medical Examiner are useful for conducting injection drug use surveillance in Maricopa County, Arizona, and to describe the characteristics of decedents who died from a drug overdose, were investigated by the county's medical examiner, and had an indication of injection drug use.

Submitted by elamb on

The severity of the nationwide opioid epidemic necessitates a fully-informed and evidenced-based response on the part of public health organizations. To support that aim, Pennsylvania applied for and received the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance (ESOOS) grant.

Objective: Review strategies and policies employed to get independent C/MEs from a state with a de-centralized C/ME system to start reporting overdose death data to the Department of Health. Summarize flexibility needed to collect overdose death data from C/MEs with a variety of case management systems/methods. Preview how overdose death data is displayed on the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs’ Interactive Data Report.

Submitted by elamb on
Subscribe to Medical Examiner