Framework for Addiction Analysis and Community Transformation

Virginia Fights the Opioid Crisis with Data-Sharing

Virginia’s Framework for Addiction Analysis and Community Transformation (FAACT) is a secure data-sharing project led by the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) in collaboration with the Office of Data Governance and Analytics (ODGA). Developed in partnership with GCOM, FAACT combines previously siloed data from different agencies, secretariats, localities, social services, public safety and corrections, drug courts, community coalitions and private healthcare systems. It delivers actionable intelligence to community leaders and first responders, supporting their timely and effective response.
FAACT was built as part of Virginia’s response to the opioid epidemic and quickly expanded to help the Commonwealth track and combat the spread of COVID-19. Now FAACT has expanded to include hundreds of datasets and gives local community leaders across disciplines information to help them proactively and effectively respond to their community’s needs.
Data resources included in the FAACT project reside in the Commonwealth Data Trust managed by ODGA and the Data Governance Council comprised of participating organizations and agencies. The Data Trust ensures proper custody, protection, documentation, and dissemination of data resources through a Data Trust Agreement that FAACT data participants enter into with the ODGA, which qualifies acceptable uses and rules for data sharing.

Recent FAACT Project Success

Organizations across the commonwealth are using FAACT to improve outcomes for people in their communities:
  • In January of 2022, several counties began to see a spike in overdoses and criminal incidents involving Xylazine, a tranquilizer typically used in veterinary medicine that is often added to street opiates. The FAACT team identified these hot spots and worked with local opioid coalitions to get a head start on addressing xylazine usage, months before the CDC and FDA issued national alerts.
  • FAACT enabled law enforcement task forces to respond rapidly to dangerous drugs infiltrating a community. For example, when FAACT dashboards showed a spike in patients admitted for suspected overdoses in a particular rural hospital, the task force moved quickly to interview patients to identify the source of the drugs. Law enforcement apprehended the individuals responsible for distribution, and the volume of overdoses in the community immediately dropped.
  • One agency participating in the FAACT platform found that 50% of all EMS incidents involving opioids were initially diagnosed as mental or behavioral disorders instead of opioid related. This is seminal for targeted training for first responders, who can save lives by administering Narcan (naloxone) early. Comparisons of erroneous primary impressions with accurate diagnoses could lead to better understanding of the symptomatic differences between opioid and psychoactive substance use.

Reasons to Engage with FAACT

Easy Collaboration
Securely access data from other localities and agencies or share your own for a more holistic understanding of our community.
Deeper Insights
User-friendly tools make data analysis fast and simple, so you turn data insights into policy improvements or actionable strategies.
Understand Your Impact
Measure and understand the impact of your programs, and leverage data to demonstrate progress and apply for grants.
Maximize your Results
Enable a more effective focus on prevention by allocating resources that best align with needs in the field.  FAACT is available at no cost.

How Can FAACT Help My Organization?

Stay ahead of emerging drug trends in your community.
FAACT has over 20 years of Department of Forensic Science (DFS) data that identifies substances submitting to the lab for analysis. 
Insights:
  • What are the trends in substances identified over time? 
  • Which localities are now suffering an influx of a selected substance?
  • What substances co-occur when confiscated?
Understand Community Service Board services and patients
FAACT has over 8 years of Community Service Board (CSB) diagnosis and service data to understand the patients and activities related to substance use disorder and mental illness. 
Insights:
  • What is the breakdown of services delivered in a locality and how does that compare across the state? 
  • What services are trending up or down, and what does that indicate in the greater community? 
  • What are the common traits and patterns across the patient groups?
Identify patterns with families and substance use disorder 
FAACT has over 15 years of Department of Social Services’ Child Protective Services (CPS) data to analyze contributing factors in cases needing intervention.
Insights:
  • How many children are in foster care due to parental substance use? 
  • How many ongoing child protective services cases were due to parental substance use? 
  • What is the age breakdown of children who are in foster care?

FAACT Key Capabilities

Self-Service Analytics

Easy-to-use data visualization applications provide answers to some of the most pressing questions about substance use and addiction at the community level. You can explore data on demand or schedule data regular delivery of reports to your email. 

Predictive Capability

Using data science techniques, FAACT conducts deep analyses on available datasets to study complex trends and patterns around substance use and addiction.

Data Governance

FAACT leverages the Commonwealth’s Data Trust which specifies what data is shared with who, how it can be shared, includes sensitive data when appropriate for entity matching (not shared), and can reference existing data.

Secure Data Sharing

Through a secure Data Sharing Platform, FAACT makes datasets available for exploration, data profiling, and consumption as allowed by the Data Trust Agreement.

Frequently Asked Questions about FAACT

How can I sign up for FAACT or learn more about the program?
How can FAACT ensure proper custody, protection, documentation, and dissemination of data resources?
  • Through the FAACT Data Trust Agreement and a comprehensive data governance model.
How will anonymity of data sources be protected to ensure its value and viability?
  • Agencies will send key identifiers (PII & demographic data) separate from domain data and will be hashed (masked/de-identified).
Who can access my data?
  • The FAACT Data Trust Agreement will specify who will have access to my data. In addition, internal data stewards and analyst can be assigned to interact with their data within FAACT.
What is the cost of participating in the FAACT project?
  • There are no financial costs for agencies to participate in the FAACT project.
  • At this time, funding is provided by a Statewide Opioid Response Grant (SOR) from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration managed by our partners at the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. 
How will authorized users be able to access datasets available through the FAACT Access Model?
  • Socrata (provided by Tyler Technologies) is FAACT’s data sharing platform, a cross-domain data hub for authorized users. Users can conduct their own analysis with every data element accessible through API or export.  
How will authorized users be able to access data visualization applications built off the datasets that are provided?
  • Qlik Sense is the data analytics platform where interactive dashboards will allow authorized users to drill into the data and visualizations.