The University of Delaware has a new resource for tracking data related to the state’s opioid crisis. The Delaware Opioid Metric Intelligence Project, or DOMIP, is an interactive online map displaying overdose rates throughout the state.
It can be broken down by census tract, zip code and General Assembly House district. It also displays the locations of clinical resources available in Delaware for substance abuse disorder.
UD Sociology and Criminal Justice Professor Tammy Anderson is Associate Director of the Center for Drug and Health Studies.
She says she started DOMIP to spotlight the distribution of the opioid problem in Delaware.
“I think sometimes we believe, or we just don’t even think about, that when problems hit that they hit equally in places, or we hear about a problem in one area and we tend to think that’s the definition of the problem,” said Anderson.
The information on DOMIP comes from data use agreements negotiated between multiple state agencies. Anderson says UD grad students work on the project to de-identify data from state agencies and apply it to the map’s data points.
“To shed light on the problem and to perhaps do some investigations of the connections between different risk factors so that solutions could be formulated and the public could be informed,” said Anderson.
The project began in 2014 and recently received a $588,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice to continue updating the site and adding new data points through 2020.