Mining the data from Americans’ medical records may not sound exciting, but it can yield some fascinating information.
Amino, a company that examines the data from electronic insurance claims, took a look at the reports of physical injuries in its database, and developed a graphic to show the most disproportionately common injury in every state.
The results, ranging from insect bites to sprains, come from every physical injury diagnosis in Amino’s health insurance claims database from 2012 to 2016. There are more than 3,000 codes that describe physical injuries, so Amino grouped them under common names like “bruising” and “fall.”
Those are injuries that happen everywhere, so to dig deeper into each state, the company “compared each injury’s frequency per state with the national frequency. That allowed us to determine which injuries were disproportionately more or less common in each state, compared to the nation as whole.”
Amino points out a few broad trends: “Suffocation” was prevalent in six of the eight mountain states, while there were a disproportionate number of concussions in Massachusetts.
Here’s a full list of the findings:
- Alaska: Sprained knee
- Alabama: Unspecified chest injury
- Arkansas: Motor vehicle accident
- Arizona: Motor vehicle accident
- California: Motor vehicle accident
- Colorado: Suffocation
- Connecticut: Sprained back
- Washington D.C.: Unspecified facial injury
- Delaware: Rotator cuff sprain
- Florida: Unspecified head injury
- Georgia: Motor vehicle accident
- Hawaii: ScrapeIowa: Unspecified arm injury
- Idaho: Suffocation
- Illinois: Unspecified facial injury
- Indiana: Struck by object
- Kansas: Insect bite
- Kentucky: Fall
- Louisiana: Unspecified facial injury
- Massachusetts: Concussion
- Maryland: Sprained hand
- Maine: Broken ankle
- Michigan: Unspecified hand injury
- Minnesota: Spine dislocation
- Missouri: Animal bite
- Mississippi: Unspecified chest injury
- Montana: Sprained knee
- North Carolina: Insect bite
- North Dakota: Overexertion
- Nebraska: Overexertion
- New Hampshire: Sprained knee
- New Jersey: Sprained hand
- New Mexico: Suffocation
- Nevada: Suffocation
- New York: Unspecified knee injury
- Ohio: Sprained back
- Oklahoma: Rotator cuff sprain
- Oregon: Sprained back
- Pennsylvania: Unspecified chest injury
- Rhode Island: Sprained neck
- South Carolina: Unspecified chest injury
- South Dakota: Spine dislocation
- Tennessee: Motor vehicle accident
- Texas: Insect bite
- Utah: Suffocation
- Virginia: Insect bite
- Vermont: Spine dislocation
- Washington: Spine dislocation
- Wisconsin: Spine dislocation
- West Virginia: Unspecified back injury
- Wyoming: Suffocation