Illinois state law mandates that all death certificates be filed with the Illinois Department of Public Health. These records are typically filed by funeral home directors with pertinent medical information completed by an attending physician. Death certificates are sent to the local registrar who then forwards them to the Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records.

The death certificate data provide information on the frequency of deaths to Illinois residents, demographic characteristics of the deceased, and the conditions leading to mortality. Deaths to some residents may have occurred outside of the state of Illinois.

The cause of death information may be subject to some variations in medical practice and diagnostic labeling.

The data available for querying in this reporting system are subsets of the entire mortality database. Six data elements are utilized in this system. The data are aggregated in groups to protect record confidentiality and to facilitate querying (for example, individuals age "53 years old" will be in the age grouping of "45-54" years old; while deaths that occurred in "February 1996" will be located in the time period of "1996 - Quarter One".) A brief description of each of the mortality data elements that can be queried in this system is listed below.

• Age – Provides specific age range groupings (e.g., age "1-4") for the decedents contained in the database. The age is the decedent's age on the date of death.

• Gender – Identifies the gender of the decedent using categories of “male” and “female.”

• Race/Ethnicity – Identifies the race or ethnic origin of the decedent.

• Cause of Death – Describes the underlying cause of death utilizing diagnosis groupings. These groupings are based on the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD). For 1998 and earlier years, cause of death classification is based on the ICD 9^th Revision (ICD-9). For 1999 and subsequent years the 10^th Revision (ICD-10) is used.

• Time Period – Denotes the time frame (by quarter) of when the death occurred. NOTE: In order to query data for an entire year, all four quarters for that year need to be selected.

• County of Residence – Identifies the specific Illinois county in which the decedent normally resided at the time of death. At the current time, the data reported in this query system only include Illinois residents.

For a more detailed description of the data elements, please check the Data Dictionary page.

For help on query instructions, please review the Tutorial page.

To run a mortality database query, please click on Query Form option.

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