According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the NIH, more than 90 Americans die after overdosing on opioids every single day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total “economic burden” of prescription opioid misuse and abuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.

The devastating results of America’s opioid epidemic are a national tragedy that must be addressed, so Indianapolis-based tech company hc1.com — known for inventing the healthcare relationship management software category — has created the hc1 Opioid Dashboard, a proprietary platform aimed at combating the epidemic and preventing it from continuing to gain momentum.

The hc1 Opioid Dashboard ingests data from dozens of sources – diagnostic test results, government testing databases, provider-specific data, etc. – to develop targeted trends and insights on huge patient populations down to the zip code level. The data is sourced from over 3.9 billion de-identified clinical transactions processed by hc1 on behalf of its more than 1,000 clients representing 90 million consumers, or nearly one-third of the U.S. population.

Brad Bostic

Brad BosticChairman & CEO

“The hc1 Opioid Dashboard is a lot like an early warning system for severe weather,” said Brad Bostic, chairman and CEO of hc1. “You would never just wait and see if a hurricane is going to hit your city, completely unaware that it was coming. If you knew that you could forecast it and do something to save lives you’d want to do it.”

Because of the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning coupled with hc1’s unmatched data sets, healthcare professionals, law enforcement, policy makers and other key stakeholders in combating the opioid epidemic now have at their disposal a powerful tool created in Indiana by top Hoosier tech talent that offers a previously unavailable type of early-warning weather forecasting for the misuse and abuse of opioids and non-opioid drugs, too.

WATCH VIDEO: Brad Bostic, hc1 chiarman and CEO, demonstrates the Opioid Dashboard during the AWS re:Invent 2017 conference in Las Vegas in November.

“The foundation of our healthcare relationship management platform is secure private cloud — BAA compliant, healthcare specific Amazon cloud infrastructure — that we’ve built expressly for this purpose of solving these very big challenges and driving positive change in healthcare,” Bostic said.

The hc1 Opioid Dashboard is designed to help government and public policy decision makers gain up to the moment insight into opioid usage trends across a predefined population set, rather than basing decisions and allocating resources based on a reactive model with six- to nine-month old data. This intuitive dashboard is equipping agencies with the insight required to proactively fight the epidemic.

In the State of Indiana, where 1,100 drug overdose deaths resulted in more than $1.4 billion in medical costs and lost lifetime earnings in 2014 alone, Governor Eric Holcomb has made attacking the opioid epidemic a top priority. The Indiana Management Performance Hub (MPH) selected the hc1 Opioid Dashboard to gain live, real-time insight into opioid usage trends across the state. Through its collaborative partnership with hc1, MPH is enhancing its ability to equip state agencies with the insight required to proactively reduce misuse and addiction to opioids.

“We’re very fortunate to live in a state with a progressive government that has an existing group like the MPH and they are already a subscriber to the hc1 Opioid Dashboard,” Bostic said. “We’re collaborating on creating best practices for getting the most out of our dashboard’s AI and machine learning through historical data and live insights into drug usage. Plus, we’re overlaying prescribing data, socio-economic data and behavioral data to get better and better at predicting problems and driving proactive actions.”

The hc1 Opioid Dashboard is also attracting great interest from the federal government. In December, Bostic himself was invited to the White House for a series of meetings on combating the opioid epidemic and specifically how the dashboard could be integrated into policies being formed in Washington D.C. that aim to reduce opioid misuse and abuse and ultimately save lives.

“It’s continuously being populated with thousands of additional data points, so this isn’t just historical data,” Bostic said. “This is what’s happening right now across the U.S. population and it’s not just health care. Our de-identified data includes workplace testing, criminal justice testing, regulated industry testing and healthcare testing, so it’s giving you a true view into what’s happening with respect to drug use, misuse and abuse. Our hc1 Opioid Dashboard truly changes everything in the fight of this epidemic and I’m proud to say that we’ve created it right here in Indiana.”

Bostic explained that the Peter Drucker adage that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” is a very applicable principle in the opioid tragedy. The U.S. federal government has already deployed $1 billion to states in an effort to reduce opioid misuse and abuse, but until recently there hasn’t been an effective way to measure the impact of the policies and programs that money supported. Using the hc1 Opioid Dashboard, it’s now possible to measure the effectiveness of these efforts, target areas of greatest need, and track up to the moment whether or not the policies and programs are effective.

To learn more about the hc1 Opioid Dashboard, visit www.hc1opioiddashboard.com and connect with one of the experts at hc1.com to find out how you can get involved.