Indy startup creates "Opioid Dashboard" to track epidemic real-time

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. - An Indy-based startup is tracking opioid use, misuse, and abuse real-time with its new cloud-based "Opioid Dashboard. 

With the amount of data hc1.com is able to collect real-time, they have the power to potentially revolutionize how we treat the crisis.

“I think with the cloud today, you can live in the world of what’s possible much more so than you would have been able to do like 10 years ago," said CEO of hc1.com, Brad Bostic.

The goal is to solve one of the biggest obstacles in combating the opioid epidemic--keeping track of who is using and abusing what drug where.

“In general, what’s happening with the use of opioids is it tends to be too late when we actually realize that there’s bad issues, that there’s a negative trend happening, so we’re looking in the rear view mirror to say okay what happened over the last year in terms of let’s say arrests or overdoses, so what we’re doing with the opioid dashboard is making it so that you can see up to the moment information on the kinds of drugs that are showing up in populations so that you can become more proactive and preventative," said Bostic.

All that data is aggregated from more than 1,000 different lab locations across the country, based on the five billion lab results they've amassed in the last decade.

The public version is pretty straightforward.

On the dashboard site, there's a live national map of drug positivity rates from all the testing that’s done.

They can then drill into a specific state.

For example, in Indiana, labs have detected drugs in 13.2% of the Hoosiers tested, with the top five substances being fentanyl, heroin, methadone (which is used to treat heroin addiction), codeine, and oxycodone.

The map can also show different treatment centers that are available across the state, the long-term trends of those positivity rates across the total patients tested, the positivity, the opioid related arrests, and then opioid-related deaths—and see what those trends look like by specific drug.

“If there’s a hurricane coming , you want to look at the forecast and do everything possible to try to minimize the damage from that and we’d like to do the same thing with this kind of an issue, where we can do more that’s preventative so we don’t wait to see the death toll continue to climb," said Bostic.

“So instead of just feeling like a helpless little county like oh my gosh we don’t have the funding, think of it more collectively as a state we need to go solve the problems," he said.

Government and private agencies can buy a more detailed version than the public one that'll be able to narrow down the results nearly to the zip code, and then ideally share them.

“This means that these counties and different organizations don’t have to go buy a bunch of servers and have them installed and take months or years to set up a new technology program. They can literally plug right into the cloud and be able to instantly gain this insight from their data," said Bostic.

The thought is that instant insight is key to at last zeroing out the overdose death percentage.

“We’re at a critical point in time here...so we must mobilize to solve the problem," said Bostic.