This R Project is similar to work being done at Niagara Region Public
Health (NRPH), who themselves found the idea externally. The goal is to take
deaths, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations data and combine
it with population estimates data to look at what the major causes of morbidity
and mortality are in the area. Specifically, we aggregate the linelist data by
year, sex, and age group and construct curde rates. This can inform future
work by highlighting priority populations or lead to further examinations of
high impact diseases.

We chose to remove 88 and 99 codes from the deaths data and R00-R99 and Z00-Z99
from the ED visits and hospitalizations data as they represent symptoms, signs,
and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified and
factors influencing health status and contact with health services,
respectively. These are not issues that public health actions can overtly
address or influence. Further, we only include causes with a count of 5 or more
in any combination of year, sex, and age group as otherwise, the rates will be
unstable.

This project can be run by putting data into the ./data/raw folder and entering
targets::tar_make() in the console. If there are issues, try entering
targets::tar_destroy() and then targets::tar_make().