The latest effort to combat the opioid crisis in Milwaukee County is being driven by data. On the county’s Office of Emergency Management website, visitors can access the Overdose Dashboard and filter data by year, municipality, race, gender and more.
Dr. Ben Weston is the Milwaukee County chief health policy advisor. He discusses the two data sets being collected, and why the county is making the information more publicly accessible.
What is Milwaukee County's Overdose Dashboard and how did it start?
The Milwaukee County Overdose dashboard is our newest dashboard. We've released a fair number of dashboards to really focus on the health of Milwaukee County and how to enable, not just us as a county, but all the community partners we work with, all the individuals in our county who are interested in it on how to promote health.
We've done a cardiac arrest dashboard. Of course, this all started with our COVID-19 dashboard, but now we're doing this overdose dashboard. It shows two different data sets: one is EMS data of folks who overdosed but luckily survived that overdose. Then it shows medical examiner data of fatalities that result from overdose
You can look at these two rich data sets in detail and really understand a lot of different trends in overdoses, trends by age, trends by race, ethnicity, by municipality. You can really get a lot of insight into where overdoses are occurring in our community.
You mentioned trends — are there any specific communities or demographics that are being disproportionately affected, and if so, why?
When we look at communities, for example, the City of Milwaukee certainly has more overdoses per capita than any other municipality. But it's followed by West Allis that also is disproportionate to the others. Now one of the nice things about this dashboard is it's a county dashboard, but it can also be a municipality dashboard. There's a drop down where you can click Franklin, Whitefish Bay, Wauwatosa and all of a sudden the entire dashboard is just focused around that one municipality and really becomes a municipal dashboard instead of a county dashboard. That allows you to see trends within your own community.
Now, the other thing when you ask about the trends that we're seeing. You see some really interesting things, for example, from 2022 to 2023, we saw a first decline in opioid overdoses and that was really encouraging. It was only a few percent, but it was the first decline in six years. But the fact of the matter is when you start parsing that out, you parse it out by race/ethnicity, you parse it out by gender, you parse it out by age. You see as a group in Milwaukee County, overdoses went down. But among certain groups, it actually went up.
One of the groups that went up the most was Black men between the ages of about 55 and 75, and among that age group you actually see about a 26% year-over-year increase in overdose deaths between 2022 and 2023. When you're thinking about how to create a community program, this allows you to really determine what organizations are you going to work with? What doors are you going to knock on? What churches or grocery stores or Barber shops are you going to go and talk to folks about and talk to how to prevent overdose?
Overall, how does this tool fit into the broader strategy of mitigating substance abuse and reducing overdoses? Are there any plans to expand or enhance the dashboards features in the future?
I think this tool fits in in any way you want it to fit in. I think everyone will use it differently. I think we're going to have community organizations that will want to look at the trends. I think we're going to have media outlets that are going to want to talk about it and see what kind of demographics are being affected differently. I think we're going to have fire departments, law enforcement agencies, researchers, all these different folks who use this dashboard in a different way.
I think what they will all have in common is they're using it to try to figure out what is the best approach? What is the most targeted approach? What approach is going to have the most impact? Rather than figuring out an intervention for a million residents of Milwaukee County, you might figure out an intervention for older Black men in Milwaukee County that are showing the highest increase of overdose deaths.
That sort of targeted initiative is what's really going to make a difference as opposed to spending a lot of time on a huge population, many of whom are going to have lower impact, you want to focus your efforts on where you're going to have the most impact. By the way, that's what equity is, right? Equity is not a bad word. It's talking about focusing your resources where you're going to have the most impact and that's what we're working to do in Milwaukee County.
