In North America we experience the highest rate of drug related mortality in the world. In the US, overdose is now the leading cause of death among adults under 50. Each day more than 115 people in the United States die due to an opioid overdose. The opioid overdose national crisis is rapidly evolving due to changes in drug availability and the presence of adulterated fentanyl in some areas leading to a critical need for innovative methods to identify opioid overdoses for both surveillance and intervention purposes. As an effort to strengthen our understanding of the epidemic through surveillance of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) we have developed a set of clinical indicators that identify opioid overdose within the information provided by an Electronic Patient Care Reporting (ePCR), Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), ProQA systems and Hospital Medical Records.

Objective: To develop a set of clinical indicators of opioid overdose using Emergency Medical Services (EMS) records that included data from Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), ProQA systems, Electronic Patient Care Reporting (ePCR) and Hospital Medical Records.