Benchmarking for Leading Causes of Death

Scenario: The QI Committee is reviewing mortality data for the hospital in comparison to national mortality data.  The QI coordinator will need to present a graph showing the top 10 causes of death in the USA for the year. As HIM director, you have been asked to prepare a graph showing the top 10 causes of death in the United States for the next committee meeting.

To gather the information, you will need to utilize National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) published data on the major causes of death at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK1_2015.pdf

• Create a table to represent the top 10 causes of death for the year 2015.

• Develop a bar graph depicting the top 10 leading causes of death for the year 2015.

• Now review the data for top 10 leading causes of death for 2003 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/leadingdeaths03/leadingdeaths03_tables.pdf. What were the major differences between the top 10 leading causes of deaths in 2003 and 2015?