Michele Farry, assistant program coordinator for Hampshire HOPE, freely admits she’s a data nerd. And it’s a good thing, too. Public health efforts rely on data.
For the past year, Farry has been immersed in the inner workings of the development of a case management and data integration system she believes will make the county’s response to the opioid epidemic more effective — and could prove to be a model for other regional opioid response efforts. Funded by a $100,000 state Community Compact IT grant, the system is set to go live in June.
Farry and J. Cherry Sullivan, Hampshire HOPE coordinator, were selected to present at the RX Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit last week in Atlanta. The largest prescription drug and heroin conference in the country, the summit drew about 3,000-4,000 people from around the country. Many of those attending work on the front lines of the opioid overdose death epidemic.
First held in 2012, the summit attracts people from all levels of government, academic researchers and other professionals as well as elected representatives, people in recovery, their families and people whose loved ones have died opioid-related deaths.
Farry and Sullivan were joined this year by a large delegation from the Hampshire HOPE county opioid prevention coalition based in the Northampton Health Department, including a half dozen police officers who are members of the Northampton and Hadley Drug Addition Response Team program, known as DART.
Farry’s talk drew a crowd of people who appeared eager to hear about the coalition’s data system — and they grilled her with questions afterward.
Likely that crowd, too, was filled with data nerds; Farry and co-presenter Jesse Yedinak of Brown University in Rhode Island spent 90 minutes speaking about how data can be used to save lives and improve outcomes amid a nationwide opioid crisis.
“No doubt data can be scary but if you allow the story that the data tells to be your focus, it comes alive. The real challenge lies more in developing the questions you need answers for with your data and staying open-minded about how to guide the data to get answers,’ said Farry. “Our data can enrich the work we all do and we have a responsibility to allow that data to drive the work”
Farry said the program will help the DART teams now at work all over Hampshire County better share information and access data so they can respond to needs in real time.
The system allows DART team members to communicate with each other on a secure portal online in order to meet the needs of opioid users and their families.
“The development of the case management system side was being driven by the process and protocols and need for efficiency for the DART team,” Farry said. “Having information is vital for Hampshire HOPE when deciding what next steps the coalition will take for addressing this issue in our community.”
Yedinak talked about how efforts to respond to the statewide overdose death crisis in Rhode Island were helped when various sectors collaborated to create open data portals that, for example, included interactive maps showing areas suffering high death rates so naloxone could be distributed more widely there.
“Data can be such a powerful tool to know that you are on the right track and to know where and when to intervene,” she said.
Yedinak said creating data graphics that are understandable to laypeople is another key goal of her work because it educates the public and keeps people informed of the challenges and progress made.
Both Farry and Yedinak encouraged the audience to go back to their communities, see what data is already public, and start small in efforts to use that data to drive the work they do.
Laurie Loisel, director of outreach and education at the office of Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan, accompanied the Hampshire HOPE delegation at the RX Drug & Heroin Summit as a guest of Hampshire HOPE specifically to file news reports out of the conference.