Imagine you’re looking for answers to a riddle and are given a stack of 2,000 papers. Somewhere in those pages is a pattern that not only answers today’s riddle, but provides answers to future ones, as well.
For years, that's essentially what Sarah Lathrop, DVM, PhD, and Gari Bodor, MS, did at the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI). As part of the state's medicolegal death investigation (MDI) system, which investigates sudden, unexpected and unattended deaths to determine how and why they occurred, Dr. Lathrop, the office's lead epidemiologist, and Ms. Bodor, a research scientist, searched thousands of forensic reports, police reports and other records for patterns that could help prevent future deaths. The work produced valuable insights about overdoses, vehicle crashes and other preventable causes of death, but it often took months or even years to find the pattern in the stack.
Today, much of that painstaking work has been transformed through data modernization. With funding and technical assistance from the CDC Foundation made possible through a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Dr. Lathrop and Ms. Bodor built a new case management system that allows OMI to search records in minutes rather than months—saving about 127 staff hours per month. Already, an estimated 2,000 cases per year have been updated using this system.
Our partners know that our door is always open to help.
The work is part of MDI Connect, a CDC Foundation initiative that helps medical examiner and coroner offices modernize data systems while fostering collaboration with peers, public health partners and national experts. Through technical assistance, peer learning and strategic partnerships, MDI Connect accelerates data modernization and the use of timely mortality data.
New Mexico OMI is located on University of New Mexico's campus in Albuquerque.
Sarah Lathrop, DVM, PhD, lead epidemiologist at New Mexico OMI
Autopsies are one method the state's medicolegal death investigation (MDI) system uses to investigate sudden, unexpected and unattended deaths to determine how and why they occurred.
“I've been at OMI for 23 years. Gari has been there 10 years now,” said Dr. Lathrop. “I've been here for a number of tsunamis of change. This change has been a very clear before and after.”
The new case management system allows the office to search toxicology reports to identify overdose trends and track public health factors such as housing status or involvement of a motor vehicle in a death. Dr. Lathrop and Ms. Bodor also created a public-facing dashboard which acts as a resource to partners.
And this modernization is already having an impact. Before the new system, answering even routine requests for information could take months. “It would be a staff person, usually Gari, who was spending a tremendous amount of time looking for these data requests, doing the searches, cleaning them up, sending those out,” Dr. Lathrop said. “Now, we can just refer them to our public-facing dashboard.” Through the MDI data modernization project, OMI has become more efficient, making this essential data easily accessible to partners in the state.
That support, Ms. Bodor said, has had other impacts as well.
“This really strengthened our partnerships,” said Bodor. “And our partners know that our door is always open to help.”
OMI toxicology now provides the state’s Department of Transportation and their crash data analysis partner, the University of New Mexico Geospatial and Population Studies (UNM-GPS), with exact blood alcohol levels and specific drug identification that police are not able to obtain at the crash scene. That information, says Rachel Bloom, research scientist at UNM-GPS, helps them get the full story.
“This is our primary source for identifying alcohol and drug-involved crashes—critical information since alcohol and drug impairment is the leading cause of traffic fatalities in New Mexico,” Bloom said. “The new database provides more detailed information than we had previously and vastly improved data quality in the state's crash database.”
OMI is located in the Scientific Laboratories building on University of New Mexico's campus.
By knowing the specific substances involved, public health teams can adapt their response to the drugs causing the most harm and act more quickly as new threats emerge.
The improvements have also strengthened overdose surveillance in New Mexico by giving public health partners access to that data faster. One of those partners is the Overdose Response Strategy (ORS) [link], supported in part by the CDC Foundation. ORS is a national program with a unique collaboration between public health and public safety that helps local communities reduce drug overdoses.
The new OMI system gives the New Mexico Department of Health and the New Mexico ORS team faster access to detailed information about which specific substances are contributing to fatal overdoses in their state. Instead of simply showing that an overdose death has occurred, the new system helps partners understand why. By identifying the specific substances involved, public health teams can adapt their response to the drugs causing the most harm and act more quickly as new threats emerge.
"The data has strengthened ORS efforts by enabling timely trend monitoring of emerging substances and overdose patterns, supporting faster situational awareness and response,” said Cassie Laibly, MS, a New Mexico public health analyst for ORS at the CDC Foundation. “Improved timeliness of the data has supported spike alerts when increases in overdoses are identified and has facilitated collaboration with partners to detect and respond to novel substances in the drug supply.”
We investigate deaths to serve the living.
For Dr. Lathrop and Ms. Bodor, this program has also been a validation of the decades of work they’ve done to support public health in New Mexico.
“Medical examiners and coroners are a key component of public health,” Dr. Lathrop said. “Whether it's a new type of overdose that we hadn't seen before or an infectious disease like hantavirus, they're the first healthcare providers that are seeing this and reporting it, so they need to be integrated into public health responses.”
While some people may not recognize the connection between their work and public health, for OMI, the connection is clear. The work is about more than understanding how someone died. It's about helping partners protect the people who are still living.
“We take everything we have and focus on prevention,” said Dr. Lathrop. “We use our data to support everyone else. As our OMI mission statement says, “We investigate deaths to serve the living.”