County Health Assessment Indicators - Glossary of Terms

Age Adjusted Rate

Age-adjustment is a statistical process applied to rates of disease, death, injuries or other health outcomes which allows communities with different age structures to be compared. 1

Confidence Interval

A range around a measurement that conveys how precise the measurement is. 1

Crude Rate

Rate of any demographic event—births, deaths, disease—computed for an entire population. The crude rate is a simple, easily calculated measure that gives a broad picture of the extent of new disease or other demographic event in a particular area in a particular time period. It does not reflect the variation in the risk of disease due to factors, such as age

Healthy People 2010

Healthy people 2010 is a statement of national health objectives designed to identify the most significant preventable threats to health and to establish national goals and objectives to reduce these threats. It is developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2

ICD

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the official system of assigning codes to diagnoses and procedures associated with hospital utilization and deaths. In New York State, the ICD-9 is still used to code and classify hospital diagnosis and procedures while the ICD-10 are used to code and classify mortality data from death certificates.

Prevalence

The number or proportion of cases or events or conditions in a given population. 1

Morbidity

Morbidity is another term for illness. 1

Mortality

A mortality rate is the number of deaths due to a disease divided by the total population. If there are 25 lung cancer deaths in one year in a population of 30,000, then the mortality rate for that population is 83 per 100,000. 1

Natality

Natality is another term for births

Quartile

A term used in statistics to mean a group containing one-quarter or 25 percent of the total. 3

Statistical Significance

In statistics "significant" means a finding is probably true and reliable and not due to chance. Significance levels show how likely a result is due to chance. The most common level, used to mean something is good enough to be believed, is 95%. This means that the finding has a 95% chance of being true. 4

Source:

1 New York State Department of Health - Chronic Diseases

2 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - Healthy People 2010

3 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

4 Creative Research Systems - www.surveysystem.com