Published By: Katie Bueno
It’s no surprise that we love working with health and healthcare data. We get to work alongside amazing organizations that are using data to make big differences in their communities. That’s why it’s extremely rewarding when we can work with organizations, such as the Department of Health in the District of Columbia (DC Health), to visually share data on two critical public health issues impacting their local community: violent deaths and unintentional drug overdoses.
DC VDRS – Violent Deaths Dashboard
In 2002, the CDC created the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which is an anonymous system that collects information on violent deaths, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional fatal shootings. Initially, the CDC implemented the system with six states. Today, NVDRS is implemented in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
In an effort to publicly share this critically important data more broadly to the community, the DC Health, in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), partnered with HealthDataViz, a Sellers Dorsey solution, to develop interactive data dashboards using DC’s violent death data (DC VDRS).
These dashboards dive deep into the data by highlighting significant trends, such as the increase in firearm-related deaths, and priority populations most affected by these deaths, such as young black male victims of homicide. There is also a critical emphasis on the location of fatalities, explicitly highlighting the differences in data by DC Ward. DC is divided into eight wards, each containing approximately 75,000 residents. Displaying the data by ward assists in local government outreach and community resource efforts.
An important dashboard in the suite is the Injury Location Dashboard. This view displays the location of violent deaths in tangent with information on the socio-demographic landscape of residents and the location of outreach programs to decrease homicides and crime. This information can help create essential insights and descriptions of the issues faced by communities most affected by violent deaths.
DC SUDORS – Unintentional Overdoses Dashboard
Like the DC VDRS project, DC Health and OCME collaboratively have collected data on unintentional drug overdoses in DC through the DC State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS). SUDORS is a web-based CDC platform that collects and abstracts data on drug overdose deaths from 49 states and the District of Columbia.
To further disseminate this data, DC Health needed visualizations accessible to the public that would emphasize the drug overdose epidemic impacting DC, the circumstances and trends around those overdoses, and provide essential resources about drug overdoses. DC Health again worked with us at HealthDataViz to create impactful and interactive dashboards.
The dashboard displays data by DC Ward, demographics, and circumstances for each unintentional drug overdose death. This dashboard highlights the increase in Fentanyl related deaths, which sparked the need for an additional dashboard that goes into the details of opioid-related drug overdose deaths.
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