A Closer Look at DSHS Fentanyl Data Dashboard

Last month, Industry Insider — Texas reported that the Texas Department of State Health Services had launched a statewide fentanyl data dashboard as part of the state’s One Pill Kills campaign. To better understand how the platform works, we followed up with the department and learned more about how it was developed.

In general, the One Pill Kills campaign looks to combat the growing fentanyl crisis impacting the state, resulting in Gov. Greg Abbott directing state agencies last October to work together to raise awareness about the drug’s lethality and prevalence.

For DSHS, this process started earlier this year.

“We began the development of the dashboard in April of 2023,” a spokesperson from the department said via email. “The idea of the dashboard came from a summit that DSHS Commissioner Jennifer Shuford attended at the governor’s office that was part of the One Pill Kills campaign.”

After the summit, the data visualization team within the agency’s analytics unit started building the platform, which showcases data related to fentanyl and other drug poisoning-related deaths based on state death certificates.

“The work on this dashboard benefited from investments the agency has made in establishing automated processes for preparing and analyzing death records,” the spokesperson said. “This meant development could focus on providing clear visuals and less time on back-end data management and validation tasks.”

However, it still took several edits before publishing the dashboard to the Texas Health Data website, which hosts the platform, and eight other dashboards showcasing data around opioid-related emergency room visits, overall drug-related deaths and student surveys on drug and alcohol use.

“For all our dashboards, we first meet to discuss the intent of the dashboard: What we are trying to convey? Who is the intended audience? What data elements will be presented? And establish a rough timeline,” the agency spokesperson said. “The Agency Analytics Unit at the DSHS Center for Health Statistics then creates a wireframe to present to the agency stakeholder (in this case, the commissioner) to review.”

Once the wireframe is approved, the agency begins to analyze, validate and import data into the dashboard and then further refines it to ensure that all visuals and notes are clear and accurate before undergoing a final round of reviews before publishing the platform.

It was during this process the agency encountered one of its main challenges.

“The fentanyl trends dashboard uses state vital event data reported to DSHS,” the agency spokesperson said. “These death records may take some time to be reported or finalized as a result of awaiting autopsies or toxicology results. Therefore, care is taken to note years when the data is both not yet finalized (i.e., 2021-2023) and also not yet complete (i.e., 2023) so that readers understand figures may change.”

To correctly reflect this information, DSHS will update the dashboard four times a year.

As for what’s next, the agency’s spokesperson said the department may add other health-related information to the dashboard, depending on data availability.