Mapping the overdose crisis: 6 locations using open medical examiner data

Area of Science:

• Forensic epidemiology
• Public health research
• Data science

Background:

• Medical examiners and coroners (ME/C) conduct medicolegal death investigations.
• ME/C data offers insights into causes of death and contributing factors.
• Utilizing open data from ME/C offices is crucial for forensic epidemiology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate the strengths and limitations of ME/C data for forensic epidemiology.
• To showcase the utility of ME/C data for substance use disorder and overdose research.
• To advocate for increased data transparency from ME/C offices.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel geoPIPE tool for automated data ingestion and geocoding.
• Enhanced ME/C data with overdose-relevant variables, including substance identification.
• Published enriched data weekly to an open repository for accessibility.

Main Results:

• Text processing successfully extracted drug information, yielding compatible data across locations.
• Geospatial analyses revealed incompatibilities due to varying geographic resolution (e.g., zip codes vs. coordinates).
• Visualizations demonstrated the contextualization of overdose data within and across geographic regions.

Conclusions:

• Open ME/C data is highly valuable for public health research, particularly for substance use disorders.
• The spatial component of the data facilitates overdose event clustering and resource accessibility studies.
• Encouraging ME/C offices to release open data and supporting transparency efforts is vital.