EAGER: An Open Data Sharing Platform for Substance Use Disorders

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project promotes the progress of data science to address the opioid overdose crisis currently ravaging communities across the nation, as well as to address substance use disorders more broadly. Numerous local, state, and federal efforts are underway to collect data relevant to substance use epidemiology, the availability of services, and response strategies. The challenge is that though there is a large volume of diverse and increasingly public data sources (e.g., national epidemiology surveys, mortality records, prescription drug monitoring, housing, health claims), these data sources are often fragmented, siloed in isolated portals, restricted by data-sharing agreements, and are difficult to use as there are no uniform standards for data collection or dissemination. The strategies necessary for linking these data to generate meaningful, actionable knowledge that is easily accessible for different stakeholder communities have not been developed. This project will develop and disseminate an open platform that will extract and integrate relevant data and provide toolkits that will enable stakeholder groups to take timely, appropriate action to manage substance use and other health and social challenges in their communities. To achieve this objective, the project brings together an interdisciplinary team from academia, industry, and government, with expertise in engineering, physical and social science disciplines to accomplish three tasks: 1) The team will create an open data sharing environment based at George Mason University. 2) The team will develop and test a data extraction and integration layer that will aggregate data appropriately to comply with confidentiality constraints from data stewards of proprietary data sets. The data integration will enable multiple disparate datasets to be linked at multiple geographical scales using de-identified profiles. 3) The team will work with domain experts and community stakeholders to develop, deploy, and refine data-driven analytics methods and toolkits for use cases to answer pressing community needs. The project will result in an open data framework with the potential to transform the current status quo of a crisis-driven acute system of care for substance abuse to data-driven pre-emptive, precision-targeted system of care. The open data framework has the potential to enable communities and government agencies to improve policies and practices through improved identification of relevant factors, prediction, targeting and coordination of resources, interventions and evaluation for managing substance use disorders. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.