ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2019. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons 

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Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 11(1): e388, 2019 

ISDS 2019 Conference Abstracts 

Fatal Overdose Surveillance in the Commonwealth of 
Pennsylvania 

Craig Costigan, Carrie Thomas Goetz, Meghna Patel 

Pennsyvlania Department of Health, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States 

Objective 

Review strategies and policies employed to get independent C/MEs from a state with a de-centralized C/ME system to start 

reporting overdose death data to the Department of Health. Summarize flexibility needed to collect overdose death data from C/MEs 

with a variety of case management systems/methods. Preview how overdose death data is displayed on the Prescription Drug 

Monitoring Programs’ Interactive Data Report. 

Introduction 

The severity of the nationwide opioid epidemic necessitates a fully-informed and evidenced-based response on the part of public 

health organizations. To support that aim, Pennsylvania applied for and received the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 

Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance (ESOOS) grant. 

Methods 

Today’s poster presentation will outline issues with recruiting coroners/medical examiners (C/MEs) for participation who are 

unique to jurisdictions that utilize a decentralized C/ME system, and how those issues were addressed. Those issues include tension 

between state and county governments, time and staff concerns on the part of C/MEs, and the variety of case management systems 

that the C/MEs use. 

Results 

At the beginning of this project, two out of 67 counties were submitting comprehensive toxicology and risk factor data to the 

Pennsylvania Department of Health. As of September 2018, thirty-eight out of 67 counties are submitting death data. The 

presentation will also discuss what data is collected and how it is reported. 

Conclusions 

The outreach strategy successfully increased the number of coroners and medical examiners that submit death data. 

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