Did You Know? CDC/NIOSH Offers Free Death Certificate Coding Resources

Did You Know? CDC/NIOSH Offers Free Death Certificate Coding Resources

What’s not to love about free stuff … especially when it comes from the government?

Recently, Hannah Free, MPH, a representative from the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance (NOMS) system team, reached out to Connecting Directors to request that we share these free resources with our readers. The NOMS team is responsible for gathering the industry and occupational information you add to death certificates. NOMS is part of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Free highlighted two great pages of NOMS resources for deathcare professionals:

While the latter mainly refers to accessing data aggregated from the information added to death certificates, the first resource offers guidelines on what to enter and how to work with families to ensure the best information is recorded. The goal of the NOMS team is to help funeral directors learn all you can about occupation and industry details so the data you enter into the death certificate universe is as accurate as possible. This data helps them “correctly identify links between a cause of death and a specific occupation or industry.” 

The page is chock-full of useful facts. For example, did you know that …

• Occupation is usually a job title?
• Industry is the type of business, or what the business does, not what the worker did?
• “Retired” or “disabled” are not valid entries?
• Usual occupation or usual industry may not be the most recent job or business?

NOMS also offers a series of seven short YouTube video tutorials (the first installment appears below) and a downloadable best practices guide available in both English and Spanish.