This project is a collaboration between VCU’s Center on Society and Health and the Virginia Department of Health.
Our Story
We bear witness to the overdose crisis’ economic ripple effects – while making the case for a more compassionate, community-driven public health response.
Who We Are and Why We Created This Tool
We are public health researchers who believe everyone deserves to live well, including people who use opioids and other substances. We also seek to meet audiences where they are in understanding the current overdose crisis – whether they have a personal connection or are just beginning to learn more about it.
We created this tool to show how better opioid outcomes would improve every single community’s quality of life. With evidence-based care, people who use opioids and their families could more easily realize their full potential, benefiting everyone around them. The enormous resulting economic boost is just one more reason to invest in a better future – and we are hopeful that our data can help make it a reality.
Guiding Principles
Everyone deserves to stay alive.
Implementing evidence-based strategies for prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery helps more people to stay alive. Doing so is not only kinder to the people most impacted but also more cost-effective for families, businesses, taxpayers, and governments.
Believe in our communities’ resilience.
We believe in every person’s ability to change for the better. When we are looking at population health, we shift that perspective to believing that every community can transform for the better.
Celebrate community collaborations.
Our community members have generously shared many stories of working together across organizational boundaries and other differences to help people who use opioids to survive and thrive. We admire their vision, commitment, and deep caring. Their strategic partnerships are key to building the networks of care we need to improve everyone’s wellbeing.
Expand our collective ideas of value.
We see economic data as another way of measuring how the overdose crisis has felt for communities. For people whose lives have been personally touched by opioid use, we hope to make their experiences of economic pain feel respectfully affirmed in some way, despite our data limitations. We realize other audiences may be just beginning to learn more about the overdose crisis. And for many, the perspectives of social determinants of health and modern addiction medicine may be new. We hope to offer insights that can help these varied audiences make better decisions about ways to support their communities’ wellbeing and shared wealth.
Be transparent about our data.
We strive to be honest and clear about our methods and data sources. By building trust with our audiences, we hope to inspire deeper inquiry into both the overdose crisis’ community impact and potential pathways to better outcomes for more people.
Our Team
As a multi-disciplinary team, our goal is to make public health insights easier to understand and more actionable for everyone.
- Derek Chapman, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
- Lucy Hahn, User Experience Strategist & Content Designer
- Tiffany France, Visual Designer & Data Visualization Specialist
- Marc Redmond, Web Developer
- Leanne Naramore, Project Manager
Where We Started
In the past decade, our Center has explored the larger context for the opioid crisis. In 2018, we studied rising midlife mortality rates across multiple racial and ethnic groups. Our goal was to raise public awareness, in particular to present the evidence that the problem of increasing mortality rates is much larger than the opioid epidemic and affects more than one race.
In 2021, we began exploring economic cost savings as an additional motivator to improve all Virginians' opioid-related health outcomes. In other words, we wanted to know, “How can we afford not to improve our opioid response?”
We knew better outcomes would bring economic relief to everyone impacted – from people who use opioids to their loved ones, employers, schools, and other systems surrounding them. But we didn’t have a way of quantifying those benefits.
Until now.
With VDH’s partnership, we created a first-of-its kind detailed map, showing which communities have faced the greatest opioid-related economic losses and would benefit most from investment. Using data from VDH, the CDC, and other sources, with advanced software and a data model created by Altarum, we calculated potential savings on costs incurred in a single year.
At the CDC’s request, we presented our first set of economic data to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2022, using the most recent available data for our key inputs (from 2020). We have updated the data twice since then, with 2023 data for our current data release.
Future Vision
Within the past year, we have been grateful to learn from many community members across the state. They have shared with us both their goals and pain points related to opioid data storytelling and cost data specifically. We have heard from a number of them that they have found the data helpful in grant-writing, advocacy, and other use cases.
We plan to release our next version of the tool in July of 2026, using 2024 data. As we plan our future roadmap, we are exploring integrating:
- additional social determinants of health in each locality
- a clearer narrative framework around recovery capital
- a greater ability to group data by regions
Please contact us (societyhealth@vcu.edu) if you’re interested in sharing your input!
Need help finding opioid care?
If you think someone is overdosing: Call 911 immediately. Learn about the signs of overdose. Virginia law provides anyone who calls 911 or otherwise alerts the authorities in the case of an overdose a "safe harbor" affirmative defense.
If someone you know needs help staying safe in active use and connecting to care: Find harm reduction services near you on VDH’s comprehensive harm reduction (CHR) center map.
If you are looking for evidence-based opioid care options for yourself or someone you care about: Explore your local options through Virginia’s publicly-funded, localized Community Services Boards.