LA County Department of Public Health
We helped LA DPH understand and address the opioid crises by analyzing overall wellbeing within communities.
Services
The need
Los Angeles County Department of Public health teamed up with the TLI Foundation to create a new collaborative, LAC3, to address the causes and impacts of the opioid misuse epidemic in LA.
They wanted to use an empirical, evidence-based approach to understanding the upstream causes of addiction, while also examining how overall well-being in the community could prevent opioid overdose deaths.
Our approach
We worked with our partners at the Institute for People, Place and Possibility (IP3) to develop a multi-faceted analysis using three different evidence-based frameworks. First, we sourced and loaded data for more than 160 unique indicators, including measures of chronic disease burden, upstream determinants of health, and data about acute treatment distribution across LA County.
Next, we analyzed the data based on the unique service areas and neighborhoods within LA County to provide a hyper-local estimate for each indicator. Finally, we overlaid three evidence based frameworks on top of the data to provide actionable estimates that were understandable to the broad range of stakeholders in the LAC3 collaborative.
The final result
Within 3 months, LA County DPH and LAC3 were able to use the data and software platform to create ‘radical transparency’ and insights into the opioid issue for the first time. The high-resolution neighborhood estimates enabled the collaborative to focus on micro-level interventions and programs, while providing DPH with better information to inform County-wide public health interventions.
Related Insights
Our latest webinar on data analysis for equity issues.
We’ll show you the three things every Community Health Needs Assessment should do.
Make better decisions about resources and care with context.
Well-being can be a valuable analytic frame for your next CHNA. See how.