County Creates Easy Public Access To Overdose Data

Milwaukee County Overdose Data Dashboard. Screenshot by Urban Milwaukee.

Milwaukee County has created a publicly accessible portal for government data on drug overdoses, hoping to sharpen the local response to the opioid crisis and assist research.

Using data from the Medical Examiner’s Office and Emergency Medical Services (EMS), the county has put together a publicly accessible trove of data tracking the number of fatal and non-fatal overdoses over time, what drugs are causing the overdoses, where the incidents are happening, who is overdosing and when are they overdosing.

The goal is to improve the community-wide response to the opioid crisis by sharing information with the community and non-governmental partners, as well as to better tailor responses and interventions to have the greatest impact.

“Addressing a challenge that impacts our entire community requires the support and engagement of everyone,” County Executive David Crowley said in a statement. “The overdose Dashboard is a testament to the importance of collaboration in combatting the overdose epidemic and driving meaningful change.”

The county created the new dashboard using funding from the historic $102 million legal settlement it won through a lawsuit against some of the biggest opioid manufacturers and distributors in the country.

During a press conference Tuesday morning announcing the new data dashboard, the county executive said projects like this allow the community to better understand the extent of the overdose challenge.

It will also be a useful tool for policymakers, he said. The opioid settlement has been a great resource for the county’s response to the opioid crisis, but it’s not enough. “There’s much more, there’s a better partnership that is needed at both the federal and state level, to make sure that we are combatting this issue,” Crowley noted.

Like the public data dashboard the county created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the overdose dashboard is regularly updated with near real-time data. This data transparency will help those responding to the crisis consider how best to allocate their resources to have the greatest impact possible, said Dr. Ben Weston, the county’s chief health policy advisor.

“By the way, that is what equity is,” Weston said. “It’s not a bad word, it’s a way to target our resources, our programs, our interventions most effectively and provide support where it is needed most.”

The data is also useful for public health researchers and others trying to better understand the landscape of addiction and overdoses. Data on drug combinations present for overdose deaths reveals the “unintended nature” of many fentanyl overdose deaths, as the drug is increasingly found in combination with stimulants, said Dr. Wieslawa Tlomak.

“This is an incredible new and enhanced tool for understanding the trends that we’re seeing in overdoses, both fatal and non fatal across the county,” said Constance Kostelac, an epidemiologist and researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Kostelac works on the county’s Overdose Public Health and Safety Team, which she described as a broad, multi-disciplinary team that meets to analyze trends in overdoses. Data is not only critical to understanding trends, but what responses to the problem are working.

What does data show?

The dashboard uses graphs and charts to visualize the staggering toll drug overdoses have had on Milwaukee County. It presents the data in a digestible format, showing how overdose deaths began sharply rising in 2020 and then began to decline in 2022. All of the data for 2024 has not been processed, but it indicates the downward trend which began in 2022 has continued through last year, Weston said.

“Now, this progress is resulting from so much work, so many individuals, many people who are here today, and so many hours dedicated to this cause,” Weston said, noting efforts to expand access to drugs like naloxone that reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, along with treatment, community support groups and other human services.

The data also indicates that the effort of local governments to expand access to naloxone has worked. Dan Pojar, Director of the county’s EMS division, pointed out that EMS personnel are administering the drug far less often than in previous years.

“One of the assumptions that we have early on is that we flooded these communities with so much low-barrier access naloxone… so EMS is having to give it less often,” Pojar said.

The data also shows that, as overdoses across the community have gone down, they have increased among Black men between the ages of 55 and 79.

“Digging into this dashboard, using it this way, is how community-based interventions can be developed,” Weston said.