Near real-time opioid overdose data provided by the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS), gives stakeholders in Washtenaw County access to a breadth of information that helps facilitate the implementation of new and enhanced opioid overdose response and prevention efforts. Through our focus groups and one-on-one interviews with stakeholders, we compiled a list of six recommendations for strengthening data-driven opioid overdose response efforts in Washtenaw County that may impact stakeholders and their ability to respond and prevent opioid overdoses.
6 Recommended Strategies to Enhance Overdose Response and Prevention
These strategies are suggestions based on stakeholder knowledge, experience, and feedback obtained through this project. Through the use of SOS, communities across Michigan can hopefully implement strategies similar to those presented below to enhance community-specific opioid overdose response and prevention efforts.
Limited resources influence stakeholders’ ability to respond and prevent overdoses. Accurate and timely resource allocation is imperative when resources are scarce. The opioid overdose reports’ abilities to guide when and where to allocate resources through geo-temporal spatial mapping is key in responding to overdoses.
One-size fits all strategies are unlikely to be effective in informing and enhancing opioid overdose response and prevention strategies. The opioid overdose report’s demographic breakdowns provide communities with the necessary information to implement demographic-specific and culturally competent responses and interventions.
Coordinated communication across stakeholder groups is critical. Many stakeholders cited working in silos as a barrier to responding to and preventing opioid overdose. The opioid overdose reports facilitate this through being easy to disseminate and share with other organizations and partners.
Primary and secondary prevention of opioid overdose needs to be a focus along with responding to opioid overdose. Primary prevention in the form of educational programs and interventions were the focus of some stakeholders while others focused on secondary prevention in the form of deploying naloxone in high overdose areas and/or informing the community of potential bad batches as indicated by spikes in fatal and non-fatal overdose. Near real-time geographic location data is an essential piece in all of these efforts as it provides more granular temporal and location data as compared to other data sources.
Prevention and intervention strategies need to span beyond the individual and include family and the community. Overdose likely creates a crisis for the patient’s family, as well as the community they live in. This means an effective rapid response strategy will not focus entirely on the individual but will engage the family as well as their community, which, importantly requires accurate and timely knowledge of where events are occurring.
Data collected through the system can be used to inform data-driven policy and programming interventions. Similar to how stakeholder organizations can use this data to inform data-driven response interventions, near real-time geographic location data can be used by policymakers and legislators to inform local, state, and federal policies aimed at decreasing fatal and non-fatal overdose.
Conclusion
Data provided through near real-time opioid overdose reports facilitates stakeholder efforts in implementing – and evaluating – the recommendations listed above. All in all, our stakeholders reported that resource allocation, collaboration, integrating primary and secondary prevention efforts along with response, and using data to inform policymakers as ways to enhance opioid overdose response and combat the opioid epidemic. With the introduction of a near real-time fatal and non-fatal opioid overdose surveillance system that provides geographic data for each incident, it is our hope that community stakeholders across the state of Michigan will use the system to develop and implement best-fit strategies such as the one’s above for their community. Future work should be done to evaluate these data-driven responses and to establish data-driven legislative policies that will work to end the opioid epidemic.