Creating awareness and action through mapping

Eight months ago when the Opioid Mapping Initiative started, a rare few governments were mapping data for overdoses and deaths due to the opioid epidemic. If they were mapping, it was often for internal purposes, and public displays were unlikely. While it is still far from a common practice, many local governments are beginning to realize the benefits that arise from engaging their communities with data.

Though the Initiative began just eight months ago, my inspiration for this work has been long established. I lost my brother, J.T., to the opioid epidemic in 2007, and have been seeking ways ever since  to tell the human story about great lives being lost, while also getting real data available for public awareness and better decision making. I started the initiative scrappily— stalking local governments and setting up google alerts on agencies that were doing this work. I quickly learned who the leaders in this space are, places like Northern Kentucky Health, the Tri-County Health Department, and Oakland County. But even with their progress, no local government had identified a comprehensive set of opioid response solutions, so these early innovators have been willing to learn from and share with each other on monthly webcasts.

Beyond idea sharing, one of the central benefits of this convening is to pool resources for national awareness. Most of the data and maps related to the opioid epidemic within the last few years have been community resources, showing where to drop off unused medications or access  naloxone and treatment facilities. While these are extremely useful, we set a larger goal— assembling national maps for the locations of permanent prescription drop boxes and naloxone access points. These maps are then able to provide a great start for cross-state initiatives, such as  nonprofits that do opioid education across multiple states.

This network has also led to some significant idea movement as local governments share their strategies. For instance, the City of Tempe shared the methods they use to map EMS overdoses, and Northern Kentucky swiftly replicated their dashboard. There has also been an emergence of new datasets that hadn’t before been widely mapped, such as the hospitalizations that Alameda County, CA is mapping and the mapping of sewage testing for opioids being done in Tempe. Newer entities to the initiative, such as Cook County, IL, have been able to learn from other local governments the importance of real-time data. Now, they are using live data from the county medical examiner’s database in order to coordinate with the Health Department and Law Enforcement agencies. The visualizations and dashboard techniques they used were inspired from other governments that presented about their work on the initiative's monthly webcast.

The Opioid Mapping Initiative will continue pressing on, because unfortunately, all data trends show that the opioid epidemic is  not getting better. But as timely data becomes more critical, local governments using tech and mapping are leading the way for others to learn innovative new strategies to combat the epidemic.

My hope is that one day data is used in ways we haven’t yet considered. In much of the country, there is still a need for available timely treatment and medical-assisted treatment. In these cases, data from overdose hotspots could be used proactively for areas under-served by prevention and treatment initiatives. As more governments become willing to use innovative strategies, I believe that data can truly begin to shape opioid epidemic policy and save lives.