To evaluate usefulness of an automated influenza death reporting system during and after the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic, we investigated all death certificates in Los Angeles County, California, USA, on which influenza was listed as a direct or indirect cause of death from August 2009 through April 2012.
The three forms of cerebral edema all lead to increased intracranial pressure; together with the lowered blood pressure often encountered in acute infection, this means that it is harder for blood to enter the brain, consequently brain cells are deprived of oxygen and undergo apoptosis (automated cell death).
Although this should be the long-term aim, interim solutions must use standardised verbal autopsy procedures with automated cause of death assignment.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently simplified its VA standards to increase utility, cost-effectiveness and suitability for use with software that incorporates automated ascertainment of death algorithms (13).
This search used SuperMICAR (Mortality Medical Indexing, Classification, and Retrieval system), a component of the Mortality Medical Data System, an automated data system for coding cause of death [22].
Over time, an internal death data application was automated to query vital record deaths, and in 2005, a real-time ED surveillance pilot, the Automated Hospital ED Data System (AHEDD), was developed by STC to replace manual ED surveillance.
As the information and privacy commissioner of Ontario, I have seen an endless stream of seemingly automated articles announcing the death of privacy, in one form or another.
Questionnaires comprised a series of fixed-response questions, with space to record open-ended comments, but this open-ended information was not included in the current analysis, as previous work has shown that it does not add to biomedical interpretations of cause of death using automated methods.
Deaths identified during the study period were screened for sudden cardiac death using an automated algorithm based on a published, validated computer case definition for sudden cardiac death using specific cause-of-death codes highly predictive of sudden cardiac death [ 13].
