By: Katie Allen, PhD candidate, Health Policy & Management, Fairbanks School of Public Health
The Indiana Addiction Data Commons (IADC) is a specialized resource that supports access to diverse data sources spanning clinical and social determinants of health. This resource is available to researchers, public health professionals, community organizations, and policymakers to address the addiction crisis and other population health issues requiring combined healthcare and social determinants data.
The IADC was created to provide stakeholders—including physicians, researchers, public health professionals and policymakers—with easily accessible, robust, and comprehensive data to help them better understand, address and monitor the crisis. To meet this mission, IADC has developed:
- Dashboards that show trends for several critical indicators within the substance use crisis.
- Data aggregated at the county level that can be downloaded for analysis.
- A web-based dictionary for exploring all the different types of data available for use, such as: clinical data, area-level measurements, and eviction data.
In addition to its original use case, this resource can support additional studies that explore the relationship between health data and social determinants of health.
Use Cases
The IADC uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to identify populations that have misused opioids and/or individuals with social insecurities including:
- Housing instability
- Unemployment
- Financial insecurity
- History of legal troubles
- Transportation issues
Additionally, the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana Management Performance Hub (MPH) collaborate to link clinical and state data sources, creating data sets that join individual records from the Indiana Network for Patient Care research database (INPCR) with state data resources. Final data sets are accessible through the MPH Enhanced Research Environment.
Further, through a robust geocoding infrastructure, individuals within clinical data sources can be linked to geographic- or neighborhood-level measures from disparate data sources. Data requestors often utilize the IADC to supplement their existing data cohorts with clinically relevant outcomes or healthcare utilization after patient matching is performed.
For more information, please visit Indiana Addiction Data Commons or email askrds@regenstrief.org to be connected with an analyst who can help you identify the resource to address your research question or policy issue.
Leave a Reply