Drug Overdose Morbidity and Mortality, and Opioid Prescribing Trends in Maine

The series of dashboards below provides a multi-faceted view of the drug overdose crisis in Maine. Use the tabs at the top of the dashboard display to navigate through the dashboards. The first tab shows confirmed drug deaths. The second tab shows prescription opioid and benzodiazepine trends. The remaining tabs show the number of patient encounters in Maine emergency departments that Maine CDC classified as suspected unintentional overdoses (both fatal and non-fatal) of various classes of drugs using drug-specific ICD-10 diagnosis codes and chief complaints reported by hospitals through syndromic surveillance.

In addition to the dashboards below, Maine CDC has provided an Executive Summary of Overdoses in Maine Emergency Departments (PDF)

The Office of the Attorney General also provides in-depth quarterly reports on drug deaths in Maine. This is the most recent report.

About the data:

Drug overdose death data was provided by the Maine Office of the Attorney General's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, through a collaborative partnership with the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. This data was developed through careful review of deaths under the jurisdiction of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Prescription drug data was provided by the Prescription Monitoring Program at the Maine Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services.

Emergency department data was provided by Rapid Health Information for Maine (RHIME), a project of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC). This data was developed using a public health surveillance method called "syndromic surveillance." For more detailed information about the source of this data, please read the Syndromic Surveillance User Guide (PDF)