Medical Examiner's Open Data Portal

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2020

Every day, Medical Examiners and Coroners investigate deaths that are sudden, unexpected, and sometimes unclear . The San Diego County Medical Examiner strongly believes that when death has a story to tell, one should listen.The department’s primary mission is to work with the medical and law enforcement community to understand each person’s story of death, to seek justice, and to bring closure to families. Each story contributes to an important bigger picture that is the health and well-being of our community.Understanding the value in these stories and the data collected, the San Diego Medical Examiner released more than 22 years of death record information onto San Diego County’s searchable public internet portal in March 2019. The idea was to make the data available for the public, media, and any other agencies that work in academia, public health or public policy, who could take the data, analyze it, and provide valuable insights back to the department and even advance broader changes to improve public health and safety.Since its release, this data set has been viewed over 16,000 times and downloaded nearly 600 times, making it the most popular data search on the County’s web portal.