Can Data Stop Death? Cook County, Ill.'s New Dashboard Aims to Try

Cook County, Ill., has unveiled a new dashboard that pulls back the curtain on death itself, offering public workers and agencies a real-time glimpse into how societal issues — from opioid addiction to gun violence — are claiming lives.

It’s also calling to attention how death is impacting the community disproportionately within different races and neighborhoods.

The new Cook County Medical Examiner Case Archive Dashboard is capable of filtering for opioid-related, gun-related and extreme temperature-related deaths, classifying them into one of the following categories: accident, homicide, natural, pending, suicide or undetermined.
According to Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, weather, opioid and gun-related deaths account for more than one-third of all deaths handled by the medical examiner's office each year. In a press conference Tuesday, Preckwinkle said that 72 percent of the county’s 1,821 opioid-related deaths in 2023 were among communities of color, while 86 percent of the 942 gun-related deaths were Black and Latino residents.

“As hard as these numbers are to deal with, we must face them head on,” said Preckwinkle.

She added that the goal is to not simply present alarming statistics, but create meaningful change so that there may be a day where the dashboard is no longer needed.

The dashboard includes data from August 2014 to the present, with new information updated twice daily. The tool doesn’t publish names of those who have died or exact locations to protect privacy. Rather than providing an exact address, the data is presented by ZIP code.

At first glance, the new dashboard map looks like a kaleidoscope of colors. However, a dive further into the tool reveals how vast problems like opioid-related deaths are in Cook County. In some areas of Chicago, dots representing opioid deaths fill neighborhoods, revealing that in many cases, multiple people have died on the same block from an opioid-related death in the last 10 years.
“The gun violence gets a lot of attention, the opioid deaths much less so,” said Preckwinkle, adding that opioid deaths double the numbers killed by gun violence, and that communities with the most violence also have the most opioid deaths.

When switching to the gun-related filter, another clear surface-level pattern emerges. While gun-related homicides are highly concentrated in the Chicago area, many of the gun-related deaths in places outside the city are attributed to suicide.
Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, chief medical examiner for Cook County, shared in Tuesday’s press conference that while her office is primarily tasked with determining the cause and manner of death for those who pass on, she believes her office, “has a moral responsibility to do much more.”

She went on to explain many of the deaths could have been prevented through improved access to health care or other intervention services, pressing the impact that these deaths have on communities of color.

According to Arunkumar, although less than 23 percent of Cook County’s residents are African American, they account for more than 68 percent of gun-related deaths and 57 percent of opioid overdose deaths.

“It is our responsibility to share as much information about these victims as possible. Public health needs to know, policymakers need to know, the media needs to know because our residents need to know, so the people on the frontlines can easily access information about where the deaths are occurring,” Arunkumar said. “This can help us identify clusters and surges and hopefully help us make the best decisions to save more lives.”

The dashboard technology is the product of a tight collaboration between the Cook County Bureau of Administration, Medical Examiner’s Office and Bureau of Technology (specifically, the GIS and data analytics divisions).

“By working together, technologists can enable the important tools that can help the important work,” said Cook County Chief Information Officer Tom Lynch, adding that the transparency of the dashboard is important to identify areas of need to address public health challenges. “We acknowledge that the problems are real and we need to address them, but we want to do it in a thoughtful, analytical way.”

There’s a lingering data challenge that haunts the dashboard project: the information only goes back to 2014. Before that time, data was stored in a different place. It’s possible that the dashboard could be updated in the future with older data, but that would require extensive work. Other updates the county is eyeing include incorporating traffic death data into the dashboard.

“Knowledge is power, and in this case knowledge has the power to save lives,” said Arunkumar.