Explore PopHIVE’s New Dashboard to See How Injuries and Overdoses Impact Public Health
You twist the cap off a bottle of pain reliever. There’s a seal you didn’t ask for and probably didn’t notice until it wasn’t there. You buckle your seatbelt without thinking. These small, automatic moments are public health interventions designed to protect people from injury and overdose without ever entering conscious thought.
More work in this space is critical in the United States because unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 44. To reduce morbidity and mortality, it’s critical to understand the underlying patterns of these injuries: Who is at most risk? Where? Why? How? If we can answer these questions, it means the injuries aren’t random; they are predictable. And, if they are predictable, they are preventable.
Data is the secret key to answering these questions. And until now, the data has largely been underfunded, fragmented, hard to access, or at risk of being lost.
So, we at PopHIVE stepped in! We are excited to announce the brand new Injuries and Overdose Dashboard. By incorporating data from a variety of sources, we invite users to explore how these issues change over time, across age groups, and between states and counties.
Where do we get the data?
From all over, thanks to our partners and donors! For this dashboard, we triangulate many sources:
Epic Cosmos: electronic medical record data, including emergency room encounters based on specific injury categories or conditions
CDC Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS): mortality data on deaths related to injuries and violence in the US, reported as deaths per 100,000 people by the selected injury category
CDC National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS): mortality data
Medicare Fee-for-Service (FFS): claims data provided by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Google Trends API: scaled search volume per week on selected topics related to injuries, including overdoses
Triangulating these sources is critical to getting a comprehensive view of these issues. In other words, no single dataset tells the whole story– rather, each captures different pieces of reality, and together they reduce blind spots and bias.
For example, electronic medical record data can show in near real-time if there has been a spike in emergency room admissions for a given condition. Annual mortality data shows longer-term trends in how deaths from a given cause vary across time and between states. Putting these sources together allows us to contextualize the trends we see– whether a spike in emergency room admissions seems anomalous or perhaps part of a larger pattern.
What can the data show us?
A variety of health outcomes related to injuries and overdoses, including:
Firearm injuries
Heat-related illness
Overdoses
Other Injury Deaths:
Motor vehicle accidents: traffic, pedestrian, and pedal cyclist
Drownings
Exposure to smoke, fire, and flame
Falls
Poisonings (drug and non-drug)
Suffocation
Natural/ environmental causes
Together, these dashboards let us look at trends over time, magnitudes of effects, and/or local and state variations.
Example: Firearm Injuries and Deaths
CDC WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) is the CDC’s primary platform for tracking fatal and nonfatal injuries, violence, and overdose deaths in the U.S. It compiles data from sources like death certificates and hospital records to make injury patterns, trends, and disparities easier to understand.
Below, the data is displayed on PopHIVE, which divides deaths from firearms into unintentional or “accidental” deaths (left) and intentional deaths, like suicide, domestic violence, and community violence (right). The differences in trends are staggering– while unintentional firearm deaths have declined since 2001, intentional firearm deaths (like homicides and suicides) have increased, reaching a peak in 2020.
We can also see drastic differences by age group. When stratifying by age, unintentional deaths decreased in all groups except children under 15, with the most pronounced decrease in the 15 to 24 age group.
PopHIVE also incorporates electronic health record data through Epic Cosmos. Below, take a look at the change in emergency department visits for firearm injuries in each state between 2018 and 2025. Most states have seen an increase in emergency department visits corresponding with the peak in intentional firearm deaths observed for all age groups in 2020 and the decline in deaths in subsequent years.
EMR data is available in near real-time, so PopHIVE data shows that the decline in firearm-related emergency department visits continued through the end of 2025.
Example: Overdose Deaths
Another dataset PopHIVE presents is CDC’s NCHS (2015-2024). The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is the part of CDC that collects the nation’s core vital statistics data, including every U.S. birth and death, along with large national health surveys. It gets its data directly from states and hospitals (for birth and death certificates) and from household interviews, medical exams, and provider records through nationally representative surveys—data that then feed tools like WISQARS and inform federal health policy.
Below, see the overdose deaths by state in 2024 based on the NCHS data. Click on the image below to explore how overdose deaths vary by state and over time.
Encouragingly, overdose rates have begun to fall, showing a 24% decrease between the period from September 2022 to 2023 and the period from September 2023 to 2024, according to the CDC. All of our data sets– CDC NHCS, CDC WISQARS, Epic Cosmos, and Google Health Trends– show a decline in drug overdose deaths, emergency department visits related to overdose, and Internet searches for “narcan.”
Overdoses remain a major public health problem, however, as they are still the leading cause of death for Americans in the 18-44 age group.
County level data can provide even more insights. Take Nebraska, for example. It has the lowest overall overdose death rate among the fifty states. However, there are several counties within Nebraska that have over 100 deaths per 100,000– up to 578 deaths per 100,000.
In fact, it seems like there are many counties in rural areas with high overdose death rates. Is there a relationship between urbanicity and overdose death rates? If so, what factors are driving this trend–the types of drugs that are available? Access to medical care? Rates of mental health illness? One of the strengths of PopHIVE’s data is its ability to spark new directions for research, investigation, and community engagement.
Per the CDC, in 2020, overdose death rates were higher in urban areas for 23 states and higher in rural areas for the other 27. Overdose death rates also vary by drug type, sex, and race/ethnicity. Each state and county has its own story, and we welcome you to use PopHIVE to explore how your community is impacted by key public health issues.
How are you using the data? Any feedback?
If you’re seeing something interesting in the data — or have ideas for what would make it more useful — we’d love to hear from you. PopHIVE is built to evolve, and your questions help shape what comes next. Connect with us at info@pophive.org.
Did you find something interesting in the data? Share this blog post with others that are using injury and overdose data.
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Sources:
Spencer, M.R., Garnett, M.F., & Miniño, A.M. Urban–rural differences in drug overdose death rates, 2020. NCHS Data Brief, no 440. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc:118601.
Tejada-Vera, B., Bastian, B.A., & Curtin, S.C. Deaths: Leading Causes for 2023. (2025, September 16). In: National Vital Statistics Reports [Internet]. Hyattsville (MD): National Center for Health Statistics (US); 2024 Jul-. 74 Number 10. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK618297/ doi: 10.15620/cdc/174607.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. (2025, April 28). A Year in Review: 2020 Gun Deaths In The U.S. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/2020-gun-deaths-in-the-us-4-28-2022-b.pdf.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2025, February 25). CDC Reports Nearly 24% Decline in U.S. Drug Overdose Deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2025/2025-cdc-reports-decline-in-us-drug-overdose-deaths.html.