CincyInsights Heroin Tracker

In response to skyrocketing numbers of heroin deaths, the city decided to begin publishing records from all fire incident responses-including EMS calls-with data fields indicating whether dispatchers had coded an incident as a suspected overdose. The records include the request's time, date and location, both by street address and geographical coordinates. To protect residents' privacy, the office partially redacts street numbers and randomly skews the coordinates. The result is a big raw dataset with thousands of suspected overdoses embedded among 180,000 incident records. To help users interpret it, the Chief Performance Officer and Crowley's team created an interactive dashboard for the city's public-facing analytics site, visualizing temporal and geographical trends in overdose incidents. He said the dashboard has become a resource both internally, for city health officials and first responders, and externally, for partners like Talbert House, a local nonprofit that uses the data to guide resource allocation. Measures incidents by day, month, and location to promote predictive planning.