Partnering with Dr. Alex Hanlon, Professor of Practice, Department of Statistics, Virginia Tech in workshops, seminars, symposia, and academic/scientific conferences, shared findings with regional and national partners, we developed research data plans, prepared statements of work for cooperative research with partners at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
As part of the initial work into substance use disorder in 2019, the team worked with Prof. Hanlon to gather initial understandings of the ethnographic needs and the resources available based on geolocation of the community and the resources. When presented with the initial data sets, the findings were that while there was a need to improve access to care, there was also a need to improve awareness about existing resources.
Prof. Hanlon and her team recommended that the Commonwealth of Virginia invest in a mechanism or platform to aggregate all of the resources in a centralized system and make that system available to all community of users.
In 2021 the Virginia Overdose Prevention Collaborative, a private public meeting that is hosted to address the need for resources to respond to opioid overdoses in all localities decided to create a shared map across all members of the collaborative. The VOPRC immediately hit a technology roadblock, they were unable to share data across all the various platforms to create the cohesive integrated solution for resource location information.
The FAACT project coordinator was able to see the opportunities to use the existing FAACT infrastructure and create a shared solution that is highly automated. The Resource Locator Tool is now on the curb the crisis website that the Commonwealth of Virginia uses as a one stop shop for all information on the opioid epidemic.
social informants solutions 