Award Bolsters Local Capacity to Collect Overdose Prevention Indicators
In 2021, there were a reported 106,699 deaths due to drug overdose, making it a leading cause of injury-related death in the United States according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Although drug overdose continues to be a leading public health concern, practitioners lack guidance on measures to assess current interventions that can strengthen interventions and eliminate health inequities.
The CDC Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believe that communities can benefit from access to consistent, standardized measures of data collection to tailor overdose prevention interventions and demonstrate equitable impact in combatting the drug overdose epidemic.
With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the CDC Foundation has awarded $630,000 to seven teams of community-based organizations (CBOs) and health departments to pilot a tailored set of overdose prevention indicators. The funding will enable novel approaches to acquiring, analyzing, synthesizing and disaggregating data from multiple sources to ensure that overdose prevention strategies reduce racial and social inequities and improve health outcomes.
Each team will be awarded a total of $90,000 to engage local partners, including public health, mental health and substance use, healthcare/clinical services, housing, public safety, social services, child welfare, education and others, to collect and share data for monitoring select overdose prevention indicators. Team’s selected indicators align with at least one of the following priority areas: harm reduction, health equity, health systems and clinical care, linkage to care, partnerships, policy and stigma reduction.
The seven sites selected as finalists include:
- AIDS Leadership Foothills partnering with Catawba County Public Health (Hickory, NC)
- Cochise Harm Reduction partnering with Cochise County Health & Social Services (Bisbee, AZ)
- Houston Health Foundation/Houston Recovery Initiative partnering with Houston Health Department (Houston, TX)
- Minority AIDS Support Services partnering with the Virginia Department of Health (Newport News, VA)
- St. Claire Medical Center partnering with Gateway District Department of Health (Morehead, KY)
- Graham County Department of Health partnering with Western North Carolina AIDS Project (Robbinsville, NC)
- Trenton Health Team partnering with Mercer County Department of Human Services (Trenton, NJ)
Addressing the overdose crisis requires collaborative, multi-sector partnerships at the local level, especially between CBOs, people who use drugs (PWUD) and public health. CBOs have insights into the unique challenges and opportunities facing the communities they serve, and health departments can help support a data-driven approach to investigating and responding to the complex drug overdose epidemic.
“Our Mercer County Overdose Fatality Review Team (OFRT) has been reviewing data, generating observations and asking questions to understand deaths due to overdose,” said Kimberly Mitchell, a Population Health Manager with the Trenton Health Team, which serves as a regional health convener. “Relevant data and inquiry allows our OFRT to formulate more targeted recommendations intended to prevent death and reduce inequities, which is our goal.”
Funding from the CDC Foundation will provide Trenton Health Team and the other awardees a unique opportunity to track and collect key information that drives action to improve reach, intervene and support community members.
From September 2023–August 2024, awardees will monitor and evaluate selected overdose prevention indicators and provide feedback on the ease of data collection, analysis and reporting.
The CDC Foundation, with technical assistance provided by CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) Division of Overdose Prevention (DOP), will convene awardees to discuss facilitators and barriers in their communities and strategies to navigate challenges. Recognizing this project supports innovation, the recipients are eager to learn and share with one another to refine their approach to collecting and using data as the projects evolve. From these lessons learned, the CDC Foundation will develop a national digital toolkit to be released in 2025.
The CDC Foundation is proud to support these communities as they gather timely, high-quality data that helps public health and other decision-makers understand the extent of the problem, focus resources and evaluate overdose prevention efforts to address equity.
To learn more about this effort, please email us at opindicators@cdcfoundation.org.
The Implementation and Monitoring of Overdose Prevention Indicators project is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to the CDC Foundation.
