The EPIGRAM computer program for analyzing mortality and population data sets

EPIGRAM is a computer program designed to improve access to State-level underlying cause mortality data. The program produces results for population, deaths, death rate, age-adjusted death rate, years of potential life lost (YPLL), YPLL rate, and confidence intervals. Results can be compared variously among age groups, counties, causes of death, races, regions, and years. The program's menu-driven interface facilitates the selection or modification of analysis parameters. Current selections are retained so the user can modify one parameter at a time. Based on the parameters that the user selects, the program produces a series of tables, one for each instance of a particular parameter. Each output table has columns for male, female, and both sexes combined, and an indefinite number of user-defined rows for age groups, causes of death, counties, races, regions, or years. EPIGRAM has major advantages over other methods for analyzing mortality and population data. The program uses relatively small amounts of memory and disk space, executes rapidly, is flexible, can be used by inexperienced computer users, provides online help screens and tutorials, and runs under DOS or UNIX without modification. The program currently is used to analyze mortality and population data for Texas. Although it is not currently available for distribution, support is being sought for its evaluation and possible implementation in State health departments to analyze data for other States, or other data sets, such as hospital discharge data or cancer incidence data.