The Mortality Medical Data System (MMDS) is used to automate the entry, classification, and retrieval of cause-of-death information reported on
death certificate
A death certificate is either a legal document issued by a medical practitioner which states when a person died, or a document issued by a government civil registration office, that declares the date, location and cause of a person's death, as ...
s throughout the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
and in many other countries. The
National Center for Health Statistics
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is a U.S. government agency that provides statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the public health of the American people. It is a unit of the Centers for Disease Control ...
(NCHS) began the system's development in 1967.
The system has facilitated the standardization of mortality information within the United States, and
ACME
Acme is Ancient Greek (ακμή; English transliteration: ''akmē'') for "the peak", "zenith" or "prime". It may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Acme'' (album), an album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
* Acme and Septimius, a fictional ...
has become the de facto international standard for the automated selection of the underlying cause of death from multiple conditions listed on a death certificate.
System components
The MMDS system consists of the following components, and is itself part of th
National Vital Statistics System
MICAR
There are two Mortality Medical Indexing, Classification, and Retrieval components.
* SuperMICAR automates the MICAR data entry process. This program is designed as an enhancement of the earlier PC-MICAR Data Entry program. Super-MICAR is designed to automatically encode cause-of-death data into numeric entity reference numbers.
* MICAR200 automates the multiple cause coding rules and assigns
''International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems'' (ICD) codes to each numeric entity reference number.
ACME
The Automated Classification of Medical Entities program automates the underlying cause-of-death coding rules. The input to ACME is the multiple cause-of-death codes (
ICD) assigned to each entity (e.g., disease condition, accident, or injury) listed on cause-of-death certifications, preserving the location and order as reported by the certifier. ACME then applies the
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of h ...
(WHO) rules to the
ICD codes and selects an underlying cause of death. ACME has become the de facto international standard for the automated selection of the underlying cause of death.
TRANSAX
The TRANSlation of Axis program converts the ACME output data into fixed format and translates the data into a more desirable statistical form using the linkage provisions of the
ICD. TRANSAX creates the data necessary for person-based tabulations by translating the axis of classification from an entity basis to a record basis.
See also
*
Vital statistics
*
Nosology
Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that ...
*
References
About the Mortality Medical Data System* {{Citation , surname1=Johansson , given1=L. A. , surname2=Westerling , given2=R. , title=Comparing hospital discharge records with death certificates: Can the differences be explained? , journal=Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health , volume=56 , year=2002 , pages=301–308 , url= , doi=10.1136/jech.56.4.301, pmc=1732113 , pmid=11896139
Health software
Nosology
Population
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention