BJA FY21 Comprehensive Opioid Stimulant and Substance Abuse Site-based Program

New York City (NYC)’s RxStat program has been a long-standing national model for fostering inter-disciplinary collaboration, information sharing, and innovative overdose prevention programming. This application builds on this collaborative foundation, and is part of a larger project to restructure and improve the ability of these partnerships to:

share overdose and drug use data and information quickly and effectively,
examine the social determinants of health and structural inequalities that lead to high rates of overdose in high poverty areas of the city, and
expand grief and trauma support for families of overdose victims, as well as linkages to care for high-risk individuals and social networks.

The NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) brings a unique perspective and multiple rich information sources to collective overdose prevention through the Drug Intelligence and Intervention Group (DIIG). The proposed application outlines three key DIIG program components and how they would be expanded and improved with the addition of COSSAP funding. The first component will build on the existing suspected potential overdose tracking (SPOT) system, which is designed to help to inform key stakeholders of rapidly evolving overdose trends across NYC. The second component will be to implement a data management and evaluation system for the recently restructured NYC Overdose Fatality Review (OFR) that incorporates a robust investigation of the social determinants of health associated with overdose deaths. The third component will be a needs assessment and pilot for an OCME based service referral program for next of kin of overdose decedents.