Since announcing the Responding to the Addictions Crisis Grand Challenge initiative in 2017, Indiana University has been committed to doing its part in addressing the nation’s opioid crisis.
With 31 projects ranging from new treatment options to reducing stigma around substance use disorder, the university is helping to meet that goal. In partnership with the Indiana Addictions Data Commons, Titus Schleyer, professor of medicine at the IU School of Medicine, is building a mechanism to evaluate outcomes of the initiative and/or individual projects, and to identify opportunities for interventions to prevent opioid overdoses and deaths.
Schleyer’s project includes the construction of an individually linked, rich dataset of individuals who experienced fatal and non-fatal opioid overdoses in Marion County (and, hopefully, all of Indiana). The data set currently consists of post-mortem toxicology, health, justice involvement and emergency medical services overdose run data. Schleyer’s team will use this data set to conduct a study to determine risk factors for death from an opioid overdose; identify opportunities for interventions to prevent such deaths; build a dashboard to allow stakeholders to learn from the data; and to help evaluate the success of the overall initiative.
Schleyer’s team is working with the Indiana Addictions Data Commons, funded through the Grand Challenge, and the Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center. Results will be shared with other Grand Challenge project teams.
The overall goal of the project is to help the Responding to the Addictions Crisis Grand Challenge measure its current impact and to devise ways to address the opioid epidemic even more effectively than it currently does.
