Introduction British Columbia (BC), Canada declared a public health emergency in April
2016 for opioid overdose. Comprehensive data was needed to identify risk factors, inform
interventions, and evaluate response actions. We describe the development of an overdose
cohort, including linkage strategy, case definitions, and data governance model, and present
the resulting characteristics, including data linkage yields and case overlap among data
sources. Methods Overdose events from hospital admissions, physician visits, poison centre …

Results Integration of distinct data sources about overdose events provided a more
complete understanding of the extent of the opioid crisis than use of a single dataset alone.
Between January 1, 2015 and November 30, 2016 10,456 overdoses occurred in BC.
Overdose deaths represented only 13% of individuals overdosing; 54% of all overdoses
were captured through ambulance records and 46\% through emergency and hospital
records, with some overlap between the datasets. Most cases had contact with the health …