Large-scale Analysis of Opioid Poisoning Related Hospital Visits in New York State

Abstract

Opioid related deaths are increasing dramatically in recent years, and opioid epidemic is worsening in the United States. Combating opioid epidemic becomes a high priority for both the U.S. government and local governments such as New York State. Analyzing patient level opioid related hospital visits provides a data driven approach to discover both spatial and temporal patterns and identity potential causes of opioid related deaths, which provides essential knowledge for governments on decision making. In this paper, we analyzed opioid poisoning related hospital visits using New York State SPARCS data, which provides diagnoses of patients in hospital visits. We identified all patients with primary diagnosis as opioid poisoning from 2010-2014 for our main studies, and from 2003-2014 for temporal trend studies. We performed demographical based studies, and summarized the historical trends of opioid poisoning. We used frequent item mining to find co-occurrences of diagnoses for possible causes of poisoning or effects from poisoning. We provided zip code level spatial analysis to detect local spatial clusters, and studied potential correlations between opioid poisoning and demographic and social-economic factors.

Figure 1.

Counts of Patients with Opioid Poisoning Hospital Visits by Zip Code, New York State, 2010-2014.

Figure 2.

The age distribution of opioid poisoning in New York State, 2010-2014.

Figure 3.

Temporal trends of the proportion of opioid poisoning hospital visits, New York State, 2003-2014.

Figure 4.

Spatial clusters and outliers of opioid poisoning incidence rate by ZIP code, New York State, 2010-2014.

Figure 5.

The choropleth map that visualizes Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) local coefficient of household Income for opioid poisoning incidence rate by ZIP code in New York State, 2010-2014.