Understanding the Opioid Epidemic

Explaining the opioid epidemic…

Dates:
January - December 2018

The opioid epidemic is a large problem in America today. The goal of this project was to understand what factors play a role in the rate of prescription and mortality per county. This information could then be used to help health professionals make policy changes and allocate resources for aid in higher affected areas.

I was fortunate to be selected as a research assistant in this project. As a part of a team of 7 along with our University of Michigan sponsor Kerby Shedden and our Northrop Grumman sponsors Lauren Trentham and Dr. Sanjiv Desai, we created two models that describe the opioid prescriber-consumer relationship and the opioid-mortality relationship at a county level in America. The models tell us what factors contribute to over prescription and mortality, and how significant each one is. From that we built and interactive application that displays this information on a map of United States. Finally, we wrote a white paper that outlines the models we built as a whole, and the techniques we used to create them.

Again, special thanks to Lauren, Sanjiv and Kerby for all the guidance they gave us along the way.