Mapping the overdose crisis: 6 locations using open medical examiner data

TL;DR

This paper shows how open data from medical examiners can help understand overdose patterns across six locations, highlighting both the usefulness and limitations of such data.

Contribution

The novel geoPIPE tool automates processing and enriching open medical examiner data for forensic epidemiology research.

Findings

Text processing successfully extracted drug-related data across all six locations.

Geospatial analyses faced inconsistencies due to varying geographic resolution in data.

The pipeline publishes weekly enriched data to an open repository for public health use.

Abstract

Medical examiners and coroners (ME/C) oversee medicolegal death investigations which determine causes of death and other contextual factors that may have influenced a death. We utilize open data releases from ME/C offices covering 6 different geographic areas to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of ME/C data for forensic epidemiology research.

We use our novel geoPIPE tool to establish a pipeline that (a) automates ingesting open data releases, (b) geocodes records where possible to yield a spatial component, (c) enhances data with variables useful for overdose research, such as flagging substances contributing to each death, and (d) publishes the enriched data to our open repository. We use results from this pipeline to highlight similarities and differences of overdose data across different sources.

Text processing to extract drugs contributing to each death yielded compatible data across all locations. Conversely, geospatial analyses are sometimes incompatible due to differences in available geographic resolution, which range from fine-grain latitude and longitude coordinates to larger regions identified by zip codes. Our pipeline pushes weekly results to an open repository.

Open ME/C data are highly useful for research on substance use disorders; our visualizations demonstrate the ability to contextualize overdose data within and across specific geographic regions. Furthermore, the spatial component of our results enables clustering of overdose events and accessibility studies for resources related to preventing overdose deaths.

Given the utility to public health researchers, we advocate that other ME/C offices explore releasing open data and for policy makers to support and fund transparency efforts.

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