Redacted R analysis of cannabis-related emergency department, freestanding emergency department, and urgent care visits in Miami-Dade County, Florida. This project was completed during my work as an Epidemiologist at the Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade County and was developed to investigate pediatric cannabis-related visits, characterize delta-8 THC-related presentations, and compare co-occurring diagnoses between delta-8-related and other cannabis-related visits.
An abstract based on this work was accepted for presentation at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Conference.
Cannabis-related emergency visits have become an increasing public health concern, particularly among children and adolescents. This project used restricted syndromic surveillance data to identify cannabis-related visits and examine patterns in demographics, route of exposure, and co-occurring diagnoses. A major focus of the analysis was identifying delta-8 THC-related visits and comparing them with other cannabis-related visits documented in chief complaints.
Because the underlying data source from FL-ESSENCE is restricted and not publicly available, this repository contains a redacted analytical workflow intended to demonstrate project structure, coding approach, and technical methods rather than reproduce the full analysis.
- Investigate trends in cannabis-related emergency visits in Miami-Dade County
- Examine pediatric cannabis-related visits over time
- Identify visits potentially related to delta-8 THC
- Compare co-occurring diagnoses and outcomes between delta-8-related visits and other cannabis-related visits
- Demonstrate a public health surveillance workflow in R using data cleaning, feature engineering, descriptive analysis, and visualization
This analysis used data from the FL-ESSENCE syndromic surveillance system. These data are restricted and are not included in this repository.
To protect sensitive surveillance information:
- raw data files are not provided
- numeric findings are redacted
- some outputs and internal working files have been excluded from the public version of the project
This repository is intended as an illustrative portfolio sample only.
The project workflow included:
- importing and combining surveillance extracts from multiple Excel files
- cleaning and standardizing date, time, demographic, and diagnosis fields
- extracting ICD-10 codes from discharge diagnosis text
- grouping visits into analytic categories based on diagnosis patterns and chief complaint keyword logic
- flagging cannabis-related and delta-8-related visits
- deriving comparison groups for delta-8 versus other cannabis-related presentations
- summarizing visit characteristics and co-occurring diagnoses
- visualizing time trends and route-of-exposure patterns in R
cannabis_ed/
├─ README.md
├─ RedactedAnalysis.qmd
├─ r/
│ └─ data_cleaning.R
├─ 2025_icd10cm/
│ └─ icd10cm-codes-April-2025.txt
└─ .gitignore