The Division of Public Health adds suspected drug overdose death counts to the agency’s publicly available data.
The counts will be updated weekly on the state’s My Healthy Community dashboard, in the “Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder” section.
Caroline Judd is a Division of Public Health epidemiologist focusing on substance use disorder. She says it can take up to 2 years for finalized drug overdose data to be released.
“So, it helps us get an early warning system, or an early alert, for what is going on with drug overdoses in Delaware. And as we know, the overdose crisis, the opioid epidemic, is very concerning in Delaware,” said Judd. “We do want to see if there's any alarming, or any early concerns, as soon as possible, and using the suspected drug overdose deaths from the Division of Forensic Science helps us to do that.”
The data is preliminary, and based on the forensic investigator’s findings at the scene and minimal information from the medical examiner.
Suspected overdose death counts are lower than the finalized number, which comes from the Delaware Health Statistics Center, but they can be indicative of alarming trends in overdose deaths.
“The suspected drug overdose deaths can give us an idea if something is going on,” explained Judd. “And we did find something earlier this year and late last year that our counts were a little bit higher than we usually experience. So it helped us to tie into what's going on with other community alerts, because we did see alerts coming out of Maryland and Pennsylvania regarding xylazine.”
DPH was able to respond to the crisis more quickly, recognizing that the increase in suspected deaths was due to the emergence of xylazine in the region.
The goal of releasing the data on My Healthy Community is to bolster that site as a community resource.
“We want My Healthy Community to be as helpful and informative to the community as possible, especially when it comes to substance use disorder and overdoses,” said Judd.
That website is myhealthycommunity.dhss.delaware.gov.