[Rationalizing the evaluation of death certificates by using a personal computer]

For the coverage of specific epidemiological facts the Public Health offices have a considerable number of data available, i.e. the death certificates they have to check; until now, however, the problem-oriented evaluation of these data has been restricted because the conventional methods require a large staff and take up a lot of time. The "Märkische Kreis" Public Health office introduced a computer-based system to evaluate death certificates. The programme described here allows the use of descriptive statistical methods for the evaluation of individually selected mortality data. Compared to the official statistics on the causes of death the system described takes additional items into consideration, i.e. several diseases involved in the cause of death.