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Overdose Response Project Overview
In 2017, the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) received additional Prescription Drug Overdose: Prevention for States funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Grant 6 NU17CE002721-02-02 to implement a Rapid Response Project. The purpose of the Overdose Response Program was to assess current county-level capabilities and response readiness of local health departments (LHDs) and county stakeholders to overdose events. The pilot project began in January 2018 and conclude on August 31, 2018. Grant applications were open to all LHDs in Indiana. Sixteen LHDs applied and six awards were to the following counties: Clark, Fayette, Howard, Marion, Monroe, and Montgomery.
This project was expanded to six additional grantees in November 2018 to include: Dearborn, Jackson, Madison, Scott, St. Joseph, and Tippecanoe counties.
Grant recipients were required to use the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). ESSENCE is a statewide syndromic surveillance system that is used by LHDs and reporting hospital facilities to analyze emergency department data. For this project, ESSENCE is used to identify emerging overdose trends and alert local partners of increased drug overdose activity. ESSENCE is also used to identify communicable disease outbreaks, including: meningitis clusters, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, mumps, and zika. IDOH has created overdose queries and routinely updates them to improve sensitivity and specificity of overdose data collected from hospital facilities.
Do you want to know more about ESSENCE? Please visit https://www.in.gov/isdh/27344.htm. Are you a member of a reporting hospital facility or a local health department employee? If so, you may sign up for an ESSENCE account by contacting Kayley Humm, Overdose Surveillance Systems Epidemiologist, at khumm@isdh.in.gov.
For more information about the Overdose Response Project, please check out the county specific projects listed under the "Overdose Response Project" in the left navigation menu. You can also check out the Overdose Response Toolkit which connects communities and institutions to more resources and services targeting the overdose crisis. If you have ideas of content to be added to this toolkit, please reach out to Kayley Humm.
Page last updated 12/27/2020.