Case Study: Tri-County, Colorado

“Whether it is death certificates, hospital discharge data, electronic medical records, or prescription data—developing creative ways to collect, de-aggregate, and visualize these data points has been critical in addressing the needs of communities most impacted by the opioid crisis. As part of the Opioid Mapping Initiative, we have broadened our agency’s understanding of how we can bring opioid-related data to our community members.”

Adam Anderson, Senior Population Health Epidemiologist, Tri-County Health

The Tri-County Health Department represents three counties around the Denver, Colo. metro area. As a health-focused organization, they realized early the challenges associated with publishing protected health information. To make information public while avoiding the release of any personally identifiable information, the county turned to heat maps—which don’t use specific dots to represent data points—to illustrate trends. This strategy is particularly useful for rural areas, where small communities can easily make inferences from the data. By generalizing their data, Tri-County met the state requirements for medical confidentiality and were able to publicly release maps to educate the public, along with helpful community resources like treatment centers, naloxone distribution locations, and prescription drug drop boxes.

Tri-County focuses not just on keeping information up-to-date for the public, but also showing year-over-year trends. By plotting opioid-related overdoses as well as heroin usage, they have been able to see that where opioid death hotspots appeared years ago, heroin and illicit drug use are now more common.

Similar to Northern Kentucky, Tri-County has also begun to plot mental health issues, such as suicide mortality and mental health distress trends.