Mapping the overdose crisis

Abstract

Objective
Medical examiners and coroners (ME/C) oversee medicolegal death investigations which determine causes of death and other contextual factors that may have influenced a death. We utilize open data releases from ME/C offices covering 6 different geographic areas to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of ME/C data for forensic epidemiology research.

Materials and Methods
We use our novel geoPIPE tool to establish a pipeline that (a) automates ingesting open data releases, (b) geocodes records where possible to yield a spatial component, (c) enhances data with variables useful for overdose research, such as flagging substances contributing to each death, and (d) publishes the enriched data to our open repository. We use results from this pipeline to highlight similarities and differences of overdose data across different sources.

Results
Text processing to extract drugs contributing to each death yielded compatible data across all locations. Conversely, geospatial analyses are sometimes incompatible due to differences in available geographic resolution, which range from fine-grain latitude and longitude coordinates to larger regions identified by zip codes. Our pipeline pushes weekly results to an open repository.

Discussion
Open ME/C data are highly useful for research on substance use disorders; our visualizations demonstrate the ability to contextualize overdose data within and across specific geographic regions. Furthermore, the spatial component of our results enables clustering of overdose events and accessibility studies for resources related to preventing overdose deaths.

Conclusions
Given the utility to public health researchers, we advocate that other ME/C offices explore releasing open data and for policy makers to support and fund transparency efforts.