First responders in Huntington, West Virginia, put a patient in an ambulance after rescuing her from an apparent heroin overdose. New mapping software is helping police, emergency medical personnel and public health officials prepare for increasingly common heroin and fentanyl overdose spikes. (Christine Vestal/Pew Charitable Trusts)
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.
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