Thanks to a new grant from the Colorado Opioid Abatement Council, Injury and Violence Prevention Center (IVPC) researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz will start tracking the impact of Colorado’s spending of more than $912 million in settlement money it received from opioid manufacturers and distributors for their role in the opioid epidemic.
"Every day, people die from opioid and other drug overdoses in Colorado,” says Ashley Brooks-Russell, PhD, MPH, the co-primary investigator on the project and IVPC Director. “It’s an ongoing and urgent crisis, and making key data points more visible, transparent, and easy to access and understand will increase the public appreciation of this issue.”
Sixty percent of Colorado’s total opioid abatement money is earmarked as a “regional share” -- that is, 60% of the settlement money goes directly to 19 Colorado regions to make use of existing infrastructure and relationships in addressing the opioid crisis at a local level.
IVPC’s data dashboard project, which received $313,198 in funding over two years, will track data on how Colorado is using its settlement money to address the opioid crisis. The data will cover areas across prevention, treatment, and recovery.
“We want to track the data indicators across a continuum from prevention to treatment and put it in an interpretable dashboard,” Brooks-Russell says.
The goal, she says, is to empower the 19 Colorado regions to continue to invest abatement money in an evidence-based manner.
“We are going to listen to the regions across the state about what data they want at their fingertips—and how they want it presented,” says Brooks-Russell. “And then the regions decide on their priorities—prevention, treatment, recovery, naloxone distribution, et cetera—in terms of the percentages of how they spend the allotted funds.”
Brooks-Russell and the IVPC team are no strangers to parsing data—they have expertise stemming from the creation of a similar dashboard for the Office of Gun Violence at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office is currently tracking how the abatement money is being spent—but IVPC’s data dashboard will take the analysis further by determining if the funded initiatives are making a difference in public health outcomes.
“For example, over the span of the next decade, the percentage of how much regions spend supporting people living in recovery may need to shift as organizations across the state provide treatment to more individuals,” Brooks-Russell says.
IVPC received the grant for the data dashboard in May 2026. The project is funded through December 2027, at which point Brooks-Russell says they’ll have published the dashboard. One of the most important parts of this project, she says, is ensuring the sustainability of the dashboard beyond the grant period.
For more information about the Injury and Violence Prevention Center, visit our website.