Overdose deaths have reached a devastating new 12-month record, with nearly 110,000 American lives lost from December 2021 to December 2022. Monitoring trends in overdoses across the country can provide vital information that can help enhance community coordination and responses.
To support these efforts, the CDC developed the Drug Overdose Surveillance and Epidemiology (DOSE) System that provides timely data on nonfatal drug overdoses treated in emergency departments and hospitals and can be used to identify, track, and respond to changes in drug overdose trends. The data is captured from health departments and describes nonfatal overdoses at the local, state, and national levels.
Through the DOSE System, three interactive data visualization dashboards were created:
The Nonfatal Overdose Syndromic Surveillance Data Dashboard uses standardized syndromic surveillance data on emergency department visits for suspected nonfatal overdoses.
The Nonfatal Overdose Emergency Department and Inpatient Hospitalization Discharge Data Dashboard uses discharge data from emergency department visits and inpatient hospital stays to estimate trends in nonfatal overdoses and calculate burden.
The Fentalog Study: A Subset of Nonfatal Suspected Opioid Overdoses with Toxicology Testing, uses laboratory testing data and provides estimates of substances detected in samples from patients experiencing a suspected opioid-involved overdose.
These dashboards can be used in combination to improve understanding of drug use patterns in nonfatal overdoses.