Opioid overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US. To respond to this public health crisis, public health and safety agencies are attempting to optimize their use of data sets that can identify opioid overdoses cases early in the continuum of emergency medical care. In this study, we are developing and validating a novel approach to identifying opioid overdose cases using a set of indicators from pre-hospital data, including the electronic patient care record (ePCR), call taking, and dispatch data. We queried all medical emergency calls in calendar year (CY) 2016 for a single...

Read more