Opioid Data Dashboard

Dashboard Tutorial

Mortality and Morbidity Dashboard

"Overdose rate" is the rate of opioid overdose per 10,000 population for all demographics in a given geographical area.

"Cause of overdose" is categorized into 1) overdoses involving heroin, and 2) overdoses involving all other opioids other than heroin. The "other opioids" category includes synthetic opioids (e.g., fentanyl) as well as prescription medications (e.g., oxycodone, hydrocodone) whether obtained legally or illicitly. There is some amount of overlap in classifying causes of overdose, as overdoses involving mixtures of heroin and other opioids (e.g., an overdose involving heroin mixed with fentanyl) are counted under both categories. As a result, the total number of individual overdoses will be less than the sum of heroin overdoses and other opioid overdoses. The data source for nonfatal overdose is the IDPH discharge data collection system. This includes all hospital admissions and outpatient discharges with emergency department billing codes from 2013 to 2022. Fatal overdose data is sourced from death records collected by IDPH's Division of Vital Records. Overdose counts by ZIP combine both nonfatal and fatal overdose data.

For reasons of health information privacy and protection, overdose counts in geographical areas involving numbers less than 10 are "suppressed" (i.e., not provided) and instead marked with an asterisk*. Grayed out areas indicate that no overdoses occurred in that area in the selected year.

Trends Dashboard

For reasons of health information privacy and protection, overdose counts involving numbers less than 10 are "suppressed"(i.e., not provided). Suppressed data are marked with an asterisk* and/or indicated as "-1" in the hover panel. An overdose data point marked by an asterisk* and indicated as "-1" in the hover panel means that that the actual number of overdoses for that particular data point is between 1 and 9. An empty overdose data point with no asterisk and no hover panel means that the number of overdoses for that particular data point is 0.

Prescription Dashboard

MME = morphine milligram equivalent. Different types of opioids can vary significantly in dosage and potency. MME is a standard measure of the potency of an opioid, which converts dosages of all opioids into the milligram equivalent of one medication "morphine" for ease of comparisons and risk evaluations. Daily dosages of >90MME per day are considered particularly high-risk for overdose, and CDC guidelines recommend avoiding, or at minimum very carefully justifying, such dosages. Co-prescription of opioids with benzodiazepines (e.g., Valium®, Xanax®) is also particularly dangerous, and studies have shown that the overdose death rate for patients receiving both types of medications can be up to 10 times higher than for patients receiving only opioid prescriptions.

ED Overdoses in 2023

Syndromic surveillance data includes all Illinois acute care hospital emergency department (ED) visits. Data presented in the dashboard is provisional. Data is submitted to IDPH in near real-time. County-level data includes visits based on where the patient lives in Illinois.

Definition of Overdose: Opioid overdoses are inclusive of heroin overdoses. Visits are classified as overdoses due to opioid and/or heroin based on searches of both chief complaint text and/or diagnosis codes. Based on CDC guidance, diagnosis codes for poisoning and intoxication are included, as well as diagnosis codes that indicate opioid abuse, when symptoms associated with overdose are also reported at the ED visit.

The definition for opioid overdose and heroin overdose are summarized in the tables below.

Limitations of the data:

• Cause: Toxicology results are not available for use in identifying cause of overdose in syndromic data. Cause cannot be differentiated between prescription or illicit opioid overdoses, nor fentanyl use or contamination.
• Timing. Submission and processing of ED data can lag by up to 24 hours before it is included in the analysis. Longer delays in reporting of diagnosis for a visit can affect the time it takes to identify a visit due to opioids, and may initially show a decrease in overdoses in recent days until all information is received.
• Representativeness: Overdoses that occur in other settings (i.e. home, EMS, out of state) are not identified.
• Methods: Differences between ED statistics from syndromic and hospital discharge data sources are due to variations in the methods of data collection and comparisons should not be made across data sets.

Rx = "prescription"