WASHINGTON: In the summer of 2016, drug overdose deaths in Baltimore were exploding and health commissioner Dr Leana Wen told US federal Drug Enforcement Administration officials the city needed real-time data to better manage its public health response.
Four months later, the DEA's Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) team had developed a smartphone application that could be used by first responders to record the time and location of overdoses and transmit the information to a regional mapping database.