NORTHAMPTON — The city has landed a $100,000 state grant to help create a regional opioid database that will include information related to drug usage, overdoses and treatment in one central location.
The database, officials say, will make it easier to track community needs and progress in addressing the ongoing opioid epidemic.
“We realized as we continued to look at missing data that we really need something more robust for us to really understand what’s happening in our community around opioids,” said J. Cherry Sullivan, coordinator of Hampshire HOPE, a countywide heroin and opioid prevention coalition based out of the Northampton Health Department.
The city is one of 45 communities in the state to land grants from the Community Compact Information Technology Grant Program.
“I view (the database) as part of the city’s continuing commitment to affecting this serious health crisis that’s affecting not just Northampton, but Hampshire County as a region,” Mayor David Narkewicz said.
Sullivan said the ability to easily track community needs and progress within a centralized database does not currently exist at the state level.
The planned data collection system will seek to minimize this information gap. Hampshire HOPE will be able to use the data collection system to better understand health outcomes and improve communication between different teams and agencies working against the opioid epidemic in a more accurate and timely manner.
Among these agencies, the collected data will be used to assist the Drug Addiction and Recovery Team (DART), a regional program that provides individuals and families with post-overdose support from trained recovery coaches and police officers. Health care agencies and first responders will also serve as key users of the database’s information.
Sullivan stressed that the database will comply with health privacy laws and will not be used for arrest or other law enforcement purposes.
“This is truly public health information,” Sullivan said. “This is about getting people services and making sure that the programs that Hampshire HOPE engages in are effective and really working well.”
The grant comes almost a year after a $1.7 million Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) grant that the city was awarded went into effect last October, which is also dedicated to preventing opioid-related deaths.
The SAMSHA funding will not contribute to expenses related to building the database being created with the new grant funding, but will be used to supports its maintenance, said Merridith O’Leary, Health Department director.
The database will provide “more real-time data to give us more of a pulse on what’s happening in the community,” she said.
The $100,000 grant is a comparatively large award from the Community Compact IT Grant Program, O’Leary added, and will be used in full to cover the cost of creating the new database.
The city is working with Ready EDI and Associates to develop the database, and plans for it to be ready for use by spring 2019.
Jacquelyn Voghel can be reached at jvoghel@gazettenet.com.