AIM-AHEAD for Opioid Overdose and Behavioral Health Services Using Federated Healthcare Data

Most drug overdose deaths continue to involve opioids as the United States navigates a new wave of polysubstance overdoses with complex determinants impacting mortality risk. Successful research initiatives must understand individual factors related to opioid overdose to fully understand the risk of mortality, including access and participation in behavioral health services related to opioid use disorder. A substantial decline has been observed at the national level in the rates of opioid overdoses for the United States post-COVID-19. We hypothesize that medical records from the AIM-AHEAD Federated Network will help explain these observable shifts using deidentified individual-level records for those patients experiencing fatal and non-fatal overdose. We will answer if declines in fatal overdose are consistently observable throughout the network and consistently observable within at-risk populations at each participating site. We will explore if the decline of fatal overdoses nationally coincides with increasing participation and access to behavioral health services which potentially connect patients to life-altering and life-saving interventions. We measure rates of utilization of naloxone, the life-saving opioid overdose reversal drug, and rates of linkage to treatment and counselling services related to opioid use disorder. We will measure and report access and successful linkage to buprenorphine, a readily available medication for treating opioid use disorder. Our work will highlight the power of federated data networks in answering questions with well-established geographic disparities.