Courts have assigned death penalty cases to lawyers, like those specializing in tax law, who have never tried a criminal case.
These should be reliable for assigning deaths as due to external cause and should be more accurate than methods based on hospital or police reports.
Additionally, we are not able to link the death of a transferred-in patient to the original index admission, and this could bias our results by unfairly assigning deaths occurring on a weekend to a hospital where the patient ultimately dies.
In these cases, assigning death as either cancer-specific or not can be problematic and ambiguous.
For the primary analysis, we will assign death to all patients lost to follow-up prior to the 28 days.
Deaths were identified from DEpiC, which assigns death based on an algorithm using information from the VA Beneficiary Identification and Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) file, VA inpatient records, the Social Security Death Index, and Medicare records.
The study piloted a social autopsy module for stillbirths and newborn deaths, assigning each death to various delays across the health system (19).
This could possibly result in changes in number of deaths assigned as HIV/AIDS death due to differences in implementing ICD10 procedures among physicians.
Excess mortality was also observed for several conditions to which ICD coding rubrics assigned mesothelioma deaths before 1999.
An additional 6950 controls were excluded because of missing data on sex or smoking history, leaving 312 180 subjects, randomly assigned to deaths due to CRCs.
