At the Governorâs Opioid Addiction Crisis Datathon in September 2017, a team of Booz Allen data scientists participated in a two-day hackathon to develop a prototype surveillance system for business users to locate areas of high risk across multiple indicators in the State of Virginia. We addressed 1) how different geographic regions experience the opioid overdose epidemic differently by clustering similar counties by socieconomic indicators, and 2) facilitating better data sharing between health care providers and law enforcement. We believe this inexpensive, open source, surveillance approach could be applied for states across the nation, particularly those with high rates of death due to drug overdoses and those with significant increases in death.
Objective:
A team of data scientists from Booz Allen competed in an opioid hackathon and developed a prototype opioid surveillance system using data science methods. This presentation intends to 1) describe the positives and negatives of our data science approach, 2) demo the prototype applications built, and 3) discuss next steps for local implementation of a similar capability.