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Drugs Are Killing So Many People in Ohio That Cold-Storage Trailers Are Being Used as Morgues

Kristine Phillips | The Washington Post | March 16, 2017

By about 3 p.m. Friday, a county morgue in east Ohio was already full — and more bodies were expected. Rick Walters, an investigator for the Stark County coroner's office, had just left for two death scenes: a suicide and an overdose. From the road, he called the director of the Ohio Emergency Management Agency to ask for help. He needed more space, he explained — specifically, a cold-storage trailer to act as an overflow morgue...

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Opioid Epidemic Makes EHRs Essential to Public Health

By Irv Lichtenwald | August 10, 2017

When public health is threatened by an outbreak of SARS or Zika or avian influenza, widely disseminated information becomes a crucial tool used to curtail the spread of disease. But transmittable diseases are not the lone threats to public health. Other metaphorically pathogenic events—the current opioid epidemic, for example—are more effectively managed by making sure doctors have complete information when evaluating patients and, especially, writing prescriptions.

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PatientPoint and Shatterproof Launch National Point-of-Care Education Initiative to Fight Opioid Epidemic

Press Release | PatientPoint, Shatterproof | October 3, 2017

PatientPoint®, the trusted leader of patient and physician engagement solutions across all points of care, today announced a collaboration with national addiction prevention, treatment and recovery nonprofit Shatterproof to place opioid education in nearly 25,000 physician offices across the country. This program, the first national point-of-care initiative of its kind, will reach an estimated 15 million patients and caregivers each month and up to 200 million annually. 

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The First Count of Fentanyl Deaths in 2016: Up 540% in Three Years

Josh Katz | The New York Times | September 2, 2017

Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It’s a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times’s estimate in June, which was based on earlier preliminary data. Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher...

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