Using Big Data to Gain Insights on the Effects of Opioid Prescribing

For years, the promise of “big data” has loomed large in medicine, yet it has overall failed to deliver. One reason is that data is limited, siloed, and incomplete. In this session, presenters will share their work in Oregon linking several previously disparate public health datasets to learn more about opioid prescribing and its contribution to the opioid overdose epidemic. In the first part of the presentation, they will discuss challenges related to data availability. Then, they will focus on the complex procedure to link data, which will be helpful for other states and researchers. Presenters will discuss limitations in race and ethnicity data and techniques to mitigate those limitations. The remainder of the talk will focus on the findings of their project, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, evaluating harms related to opioid prescribing at the individual, household, and community level using this powerful linked dataset. This session should interest prescribers/clinicians, public health department staff, epidemiologists, researchers, and community advocates.