Overview

Opioid overdose represents an urgent public health problem in the United States, with Michigan ranking among the states hardest hit by the dramatic escalation over the past 15 years. A key component of addressing this crisis is timely surveillance—and accompanying data analytics—that can be used to guide resource allocation used for rapid response and prevention.

SOS is a web-based tool that offers two level of access. The first level is public, and displays county-level summaries. The second level of access—which is available to authorized public health and public safety users across the state of Michigan —maps non-fatal and fatal opioid overdose incidents in near real-time, and provides demographic briefs. This interactive dashboard includes features that allow users to tailor visualizations to meet their specific needs. Users can select a data source, a zoom window, and a time frame to display points and descriptive summaries of suspected overdoses. Users can also toggle buttons to restrict the visualizations and summaries to only specific subsets (e.g., age groups and/or genders). This previously unavailable tool is designed to inform data-driven opioid overdose prevention and response efforts with the goal of reducing overdose injuries and fatalities.

SOS was created through a partnership between the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center and Michigan High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA).

User Resources

Access a video tutorial detailing features of the SOS user dashboard, read SOS community stakeholder testimonials, and view a sample suspected overdose report below.

Community Overdose Response Toolkits

Three unique guides detailing actions communities can take to strengthen their coordinated community responses to opioid overdose, using data from the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS).