Documentation

MICA

The Missouri Information for Community Assessment (MICA) system was developed to make health data accessible at the local level, through an easy to use format. This is an interactive system that allows users to summarize data, calculate rates, and prepare information in a graphic format for presentation.

MICA provides data on health conditions, including causes of death, births, hospitalizations, emergency room use, etc. Users can choose from among the many conditions and generate ad hoc data tables by year of occurrence, age, gender, race, county and zip code of residence and age-adjusted rates. MICA also allows users to download the data table into other applications, in order to produce charts or graphs.

Data for MICA are extracted and summarized for the highest level of detail from files maintained by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. The data are summarized and the frequencies are pre-computed for each combination of the variables. This provides two major advantages: the response time to create and return a table is usually less than five seconds and no individual record can be accessed. Confidentiality rules have been developed to protect the privacy of individuals.

The system uses the facilities provided by a web browser and Internet server using Common Gateway Interface (CGI). It consists of HTML code, C programs and a key lookup database.