CRISP has been working diligently to enhance and expand suspected nonfatal drug overdose alerting to link affected persons to appropriate care. According to the Maryland Department of Health, the greatest predictor of a fatal drug overdose is a nonfatal drug overdose. We’ve worked closely with CRISP’s Behavioral Health Subcommittee and our state partners to develop CRISP-wide logic to capture suspected nonfatal overdoses that are inclusive of both hospital and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) data sources. Ultimately, our goal is to increase provider awareness of and access to nonfatal overdose events that occur among their patients to allow for timelier follow up and outreach. The three main methods of alerts are described below:
1. Alerts to Local Health Departments
In accordance with a 2019 use case, Local Health Departments (LHD) are eligible to receive suspected nonfatal overdose alerts for their residents or incidents that occur in their county. Both EMS-based and hospital ED-based alerts are delivered via CRISP Direct secure email and file transfer each day. Seven LHDs are currently piloting these alerts. CRISP is aiming to expand this to more LHDs in 2023.
2. Priority Alerts
These alerts are triggered for both suspected nonfatal overdose events that result in treatment by EMS providers or overdose events reported by a hospital ED. The recent inclusion of EMS data will enable alerting for EMS-treated suspected overdose events, which includes alerting for events that do not result in ambulance transport to hospitals. In addition, we recently updated the ICD-10 diagnosis code set that triggers the hospital-based alerts.
Alerts are available via the HIE InContext & Clinical Information Service Application within a patient’s health record and as an alert in the Priority alert section. Examples are shown below.
Select the Bell icon in the top right corner of the HIE InContext screen to view Priority Alerts.
Once Priority Alerts are selected, alerts will display like below. Screenshot includes examples of both EMS-based and hospital-based overdose alerts.
3. Population Explorer Alerts
These alerts are available in the new Portal. CRISP users can filter to nonfatal drug overdose events via Population Explorer. Alerts are based on EMS and hospital ED data.
