One of us lost a best friend to an accidental opioid overdose. She died behind a locked door in a Vancouver apartment.

Hers was among 75,000 yearly North American overdose deaths, two-thirds of which involve opioid drugs. And our research suggests the crisis is larger still. We need more data.

Overdoses are often accidental and reversible. But non-fatal overdoses typically aren’t recorded without an emergency responder, hospital worker or coroner. Many who use drugs are marginalized and isolated, beyond front-line care. Even if recorded, data might go unshared.

A crisis kills 12 Canadians a day and we don’t share all we know. Drug use consequences are national in scope, but health services and access to information are not. And overdoses are intensely local.

So responses vary. Cities like Vancouver have strategies, but others remain in the dark. How to respond if they can’t see the data?

To fill the gaps, we need new solutions. Hence the Opioid Data Challenge, a federally funded project to illuminate the crisis.

At Brave Technology Co-op, based in Vancouver, we had already been working on digital tools to help keep people at risk alive with remote supervision. For the challenge, we worked with data sources generated by a button people in supportive housing can press to tell naloxone-trained staff they’re about to use drugs.

Over six months, we captured 10 cases where emergency or medical services responded to a non-fatal opioid overdose. We also captured 88 cases where there was no official response. This shows how underreported the crisis is, how much goes into responding, how many remain isolated.

In southern Ontario, staff at Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health were also developing tools. Working with 15 community partners and agencies, data timeliness was a constant issue. We needed to react faster to drug supply changes.

So, we built an online survey using simple questions local responders could use to quickly gather, analyze and distribute overdose data. Over four months, the data captured 16 suspected non-fatal opioid overdoses that hadn’t involved emergency or medical services — 36 per cent more than otherwise would have been reported.

Incident spikes have triggered alerts shared with emergency responders seven times since July 2018. Information that arrived six months late is now analyzed, distributed and acted on in real time.

The platform’s easy to replicate. With training, anyone can create one at zero cost. We’ve shared it with communities in Ontario and Yukon public health officials.

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It’s about collaboration. This crisis has touched nearly every community and ravaged lives behind many locked doors.

We’ve been in touch with others who want to solve this crisis with data. If you are interested, we’d like to hear from you, too.