Final Project Proposal: New York State Maternity and Labor Statistics

Maternity and labor are a crucial time for many health interventions, and New York state notably mandates basic statistics be available for a few dozen characteristics of delivery. The route of delivery, fetal presentation, and use of anesthesia are all critical elements of the process, and understanding the prevalence and trends of each method may offer improvements in expectations to practitioners as well as laypeople.

ny_maternity <- read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hillt5/DATA608/main/Hospital_Maternity_Information__Beginning_2008.csv')

The dataset available for NY state offers the required statistics for a period 2008 – 2017, separated by each hospital and its location. For this project, my goals are to provide some visualizations and apps for laypeople to explore maternity statistics.

head(ny_maternity)
##   Year Facility.ID                  Hospital.Name Hospital.County Measure.ID
## 1 2010         213                 Mercy Hospital            ERIE         25
## 2 2012         727                Oswego Hospital          OSWEGO          2
## 3 2012        1005           Glens Falls Hospital          WARREN          1
## 4 2008           1 Albany Medical Center Hospital          ALBANY          1
## 5 2008           1 Albany Medical Center Hospital          ALBANY          2
## 6 2008           1 Albany Medical Center Hospital          ALBANY          4
##                  Measure.Name    Denominator       Category Count Percent
## 1             Cesarean Births All Deliveries Route & Method   804    34.9
## 2            Forceps Delivery All Deliveries Route & Method     0     0.0
## 3                Total Births All Deliveries All Deliveries  1393      NA
## 4                Total Births All Deliveries All Deliveries  2282      NA
## 5            Forceps Delivery All Deliveries Route & Method    53     2.3
## 6 Low/Outlet Forceps Delivery All Deliveries Route & Method    53     2.3
colnames(ny_maternity)
##  [1] "Year"            "Facility.ID"     "Hospital.Name"   "Hospital.County"
##  [5] "Measure.ID"      "Measure.Name"    "Denominator"     "Category"       
##  [9] "Count"           "Percent"
unique(ny_maternity$Year)
##  [1] 2010 2012 2008 2009 2015 2014 2011 2013 2016 2017
length(unique(ny_maternity$Facility.ID))
## [1] 145
unique(ny_maternity$Measure.Name)
##  [1] "Cesarean Births"                            
##  [2] "Forceps Delivery"                           
##  [3] "Total Births"                               
##  [4] "Low/Outlet Forceps Delivery"                
##  [5] "Mid Forceps Delivery"                       
##  [6] "Internal Fetal Monitoring"                  
##  [7] "External Fetal Monitoring"                  
##  [8] "Induction - Artificial Rupture of Membranes"
##  [9] "Induction - Medicinal"                      
## [10] "Augmented Labor"                            
## [11] "Analgesia"                                  
## [12] "Attended by Licensed Midwife"               
## [13] "Vaginal Births"                             
## [14] "Vaginal Birth After Prior Cesarean"         
## [15] "Total Births After Prior Cesarean"          
## [16] "Breech Births Delivered Vaginally"          
## [17] "Episiotomy"                                 
## [18] "General Anesthesia"                         
## [19] "Spinal Anesthesia"                          
## [20] "Epidural Anesthesia"                        
## [21] "Local/Other Anesthesia"                     
## [22] "Paracervical Anesthesia"                    
## [23] "Pudendal Anesthesia"                        
## [24] "Primary Cesarean"                           
## [25] "Repeat Cesarean"                            
## [26] "Epidural/Local Anesthesia"                  
## [27] "Fed Any Breast Milk"                        
## [28] "Fed Exclusively Breast Milk"                
## [29] "Breast Fed Infants Supplemented w/Formula"
unique(ny_maternity$Denominator)
## [1] "All Deliveries"                   "Deliveries After Prior C-Section"
## [3] "Vaginal Deliveries"               "Cesarean Deliveries"             
## [5] "Infants Fed Any Breast Milk"
unique(ny_maternity$Category)
## [1] "Route & Method"                      "All Deliveries"                     
## [3] "Characteristics of Labor & Delivery" "Anesthesia & Analgesia"             
## [5] "Attendant"                           "Fetal Presentation"                 
## [7] "Infant Feeding Method"

Looking at the structure of the dataframe, it appears to be in a tall format. The dataframe has entries for 2010 - 2017, and it looks at 29 different measures collectted from 145 facilities. There are also 7 different categories consiered, while the Denominator category that describes where the percentages were calculated.

Previous projects have concentrated geographical visualizations of births, which mirrored overall population. In addition to a map, I also intend on adding webapps for visualizing trends over time, with adjustable time period and locations. I think it will also be useful to allow comparisons of nearby hospitals to see distinctions over smaller areas. Lastly, I’ll provide static graph offering comparisons of county population versus fertility and birth defect rate.

Previous projects:

https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/visualizing-birth-and-maternity-trends-in-new-york-state/

Source dataset:

https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Hospital-Maternity-Information-Beginning-2008/net3-iygw

Potential adjunct datasets:

https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Birth-Defect-Prevalence-Beginning-1992/mz8x-255x

https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Vital-Statistics-Live-Births-and-Fertility-Rates-b/c2tx-jecb

https://data.ny.gov/Government-Finance/Annual-Population-Estimates-for-New-York-State-and/krt9-ym2k