Springfield Department of Health and Human Services announces the creation of its Springfield Coalition for Overdose Prevention (SCOOP) Opioid Database, enabling project partners to assess local conditions and design programming to address the local Heroin and Opioid crisis. This fully, relational database system – designed and built by Ready EDI and Associates – includes data supersets from US Census; MA Registry of Vital Records (Death Certificate data); MA State Police (National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data); MA Department of Public Health MATRIS (EMS) Overdose data and PNP/MassPat Prescription drug data, as well as survey and other datasets.
Mayor Domenic J. Sarno stated, “I commend Health & Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris for this important initiative. I remain steadfast in the importance of having wraparound services for those affected. Many of us have been affected, whether through friends or family members directly or indirectly with the negative wrath of health and public safety issues. This opioid crisis has destroyed lives and relationships. Key here is there must be treatment beds and full wraparound for those affected Springfield individuals and families. This tracking info is essential to reaching this goal in order to save lives.”
The system was built to US Department of Health and Human Services and HIPAA standards and will be managed according to health, criminal justice and other laws covering privacy and protected information. While none of the data provided for the prototype are in ‘real time’, this database system was designed for real time capacity to manage and analyze data received from many points at high speeds.
Springfield Department of Health and Human Services (SDHHS) intends to develop this system to track overdoses, manage outreach, prevention and mitigation programming, as well as other departmental programming needs.
“This system can be used as a data hub to drive the full range of SDHHS surveillance, programming and inspection responsibilities,” said Springfield HHS Commissioner Helen R. Caulton Harris. “This system can be customized with artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to allow advanced forecasting. Every dataset we add to this system increases our ability to analyze local conditions and ask more sophisticated questions of the data. Ultimately, we will be able to drive our programming, inspections and permitting duties using these systems, so that we can better track program effectiveness and streamline our relationship to the public.”