Hungry for help with reining in a drug-abuse crisis, state and New Haven officials were briefed Thursday on ways that satellite mapping could be used to help the state’s 169 cities and towns prepare for and respond to clusters of overdoses.
A co-developer of the technology said it’s based on the tsunami and Ebola early-warning systems, and can provide real-time information on spikes in demand for opioids and other narcotics, where the resulting overdoses are occurring and where those clusters may hit next.
Police and fire officials, legislators, agency commissioners and health professionals gathered in a ninth-floor conference room overlooking the New Haven Green — thrust into the national spotlight earlier this month when 47 people overdosed, most of them multiple times, on synthetic cannabis laced with a version of a discarded former research drug from Pfizer called AB-Fubinaca.
Dr. Frank Lee, a pain management specialist and one of the founders of a small health data company called Telesphora, said that if his firm was granted access to all of the various daily reports on opioid overdoses — from municipalities, first responder agencies, hospital emergency rooms, needle exchange programs and other sources — then his people could sift through the data, make sense of it, plot it all on a GPS map, and share it with officials through an app.
“Let small companies like ours do the dirty work,” said Lee, a teacher, author and practicing physician who did his medical training at Johns Hopkins University. Telesphora worked with Origami Innovations laboratory to develop the mapping technology and its research methods.
The technology would help the state supply towns and cities with the right amount of the opioid antidote naloxone, which is expensive and has a short shelf life. It could also help identify where more prevention and treatment programs are needed, and give localities more time to prepare for a possible outbreak of overdoses.
The legislature would have to pass a law allowing the medical information to be shared with a vendor.
While the lawmakers in attendance Thursday didn’t immediately commit to sponsoring a new data-sharing bill, state Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said the state has to more adequately address the opioid crisis. He said it has spilled into smaller towns that never had a crime problem or a public health crisis and is sucking up their resources at an alarming rate.
“They are frightened,” Looney said.
Dr. Raul Pina, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, said the predictive technology described by Lee has potential. He said DPH now gets real-time information on overdose cases in hospital emergency rooms around the state, and he said he could see sharing that with a vendor if the legalities are worked out.
But he cautioned, “The opioid crisis is here to stay for a while,” fueled, he said, “by a perfect storm of social factors.” He said the challenge is to reduce the frequency of drug addiction in the future.
