Statewide System to Track Drug Overdoses in Texas
As the rate of opioid and other drug overdoses continues to rise in Texas, an interdisciplinary team of developers, designers, clinical partners and researchers has created a digital reporting and surveillance system to track drug overdoses statewide.
Known as Project CONNECT, the program aims to provide a more complete picture of the overdose crisis in Texas and guide future interventions. The effort is led by Dell Medical School and the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin and funded by the Texas Targeted Opioid Response (TTOR) program at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The Project CONNECT team has already conducted a four-month pilot with harm reduction groups in Williamson, El Paso, Bexar and Travis counties, and it is now preparing to launch the platform statewide.
“Based on anecdotal evidence, between 50 percent and 90 percent of overdoses in Texas go unreported,” said Kasey Claborn, Ph.D., lead researcher on the project and an assistant professor at both Dell Med and the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, in a statement. “One of the biggest hurdles to solving this crisis is the lack of accurate, consistent and timely statewide data available on both fatal and nonfatal overdoses. Project CONNECT will track overdoses by location—and as they happen—creating huge data pools that can be used to understand the scope of the problem and get life-saving resources to the areas and people who need them.”
The reporting gap—and the uncounted overdoses it represents—extends beyond opioid use. “We've been seeing a rise in stimulant, cocaine and meth overdoses within the last five years, which has been amplified during COVID,” said Claborn.
To improve overdose reporting, Dell Med’s information technology team worked with Google Cloud partner Maven Wave to develop a pilot reporting site, TxCOPE.org: Texans Connecting Overdose Prevention Efforts. TxCOPE is an application and web-based digital platform designed to track overdose data by a variety of groups, gathering input including demographics, overdose event details and the use of drugs such as naloxone to reverse overdoses.
“The research data gathered during the pilot will help us develop digital platforms uniquely tailored to various end users, from healthcare workers and first responders to harm reduction groups and the community at large,” said Andrea Daugherty, interim chief information officer at Dell Med, in a statement. “This robust tracking system is designed to gather key metrics about overdose trends across the state and deliver that info to people who can put it to use, including those who direct funding and allocation of resources.”
That’s especially important to harm reduction groups, which can also use the TxCOPE website to order supplies including life-saving drugs such as naloxone.
To develop a comprehensive picture of existing barriers, Project CONNECT worked with community advisory boards at the four pilot sites across Texas to identify obstacles to secure, accurate data collection. In addition, the team has also interviewed more than 100 people in the community, including those who use drugs, harm reductionists, first responders, health care workers and other key stakeholders.
The knowledge gained from these advisory boards, along with the pilot study, will help the team create an implementation protocol that can be scaled statewide. The team aims to have that protocol ready for launch by early 2022.
