About this publication

Why Notes from the Abstracts?

If you've ever read a research paper, either because you were curious about a study or you were looking for a smoking gun to aid in your latest Facebook argument, one of the first sections you'll encounter is the Abstract. This paragraph or two gives the reader the flavor of the study before they wade into the murky waters of the full, dense text. Sadly, too many people—even those who cite public health statistics—often stop there without the full context.

There is also the act of abstracting itself, which is the exhaustive but oddly satisfying process a medical coder goes through to pull information from sources like a medical file or a physician's notes and turn it into an alphanumeric code to be used for statistics, reimbursement, and any number of other uses. With both meanings of the term, information gets simplified before most readers ever set eyes on it, but sometimes the simplification process is where things go missing.

My name is Andrew Crocker. I graduated summa cum laude from Fisher College in Boston, Massachusetts with a degree in Health Information Management (HIM) and am now working toward graduate studies in public health clinical epidemiology. Additionally, I hold certifications in professional coding (CPC), emergency department coding (CEDC), and outpatient surgical coding (COSC). I have spent enough time inside the medical system to understand how much gets lost between a patient encounter and the statistic a talking head on TV throws at you.

Medical disinformation does not always look like a conspiracy theory. Sometimes, it looks like a bar chart with a clean y-axis and no methodology footnote.

My goal with this little publication is to make the hidden architecture of public health understandable and to give readers the tools to confront the data head-on with the right context and the power to ask the right questions. You don't need a clinical background to grasp many of these concepts. But curiosity is, along with a reasonable tolerance for the fact that systems are messier than they appear from the outside, an absolute must.

In this little world, I publish long-form analysis, opinions, data visualization, and primary sources. If you're interested in the machinery behind the numbers, well, my friend, you're in the right place.