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Committee approves sharing deidentified EMS overdose data with national ODMAP system
Summary
House File 1429 would allow deidentified emergency medical services (EMS) data on overdoses to be shared with the national ODMAP system to identify overdose spikes more quickly; committee adopted an amendment clarifying data elements and voted to place the bill on the general register.
The House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee on March 20 advanced House File 1429, a bill to allow limited, deidentified EMS overdose data to be shared with ODMAP, a national overdose mapping platform used by first responders and public-health officials.
Sponsor Chair Liebling described the bill as a public-health tool that would let officials spot overdose spikes more quickly and distribute naloxone or other responses when a dangerous batch of drugs appears in a community. Jeremy Drucker, director of the Office of Addiction and Recovery, told the committee that 27 states already share EMS data with ODMAP and that the system is maintained by a DEA-sponsored High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program in Maryland and Baltimore.
Drucker said the bill authorizes sharing deidentified incident data — location, time, substances involved, naloxone administration, and whether the event was fatal — and that “no information about specific individuals is shared.” He said the system “max masks the exact location to again mitigate the chance of identifying someone in a smaller community,” and that authorized, verified users such as first responders, law enforcement and public-health officials would have role-limited access.
Dylan Ferguson, director of the Minnesota Office of Emergency Medical Services, said the office supports the bill and that the change will likely increase the timeliness and quality of reporting to ODMAP. Privacy advocate Rich Neumeister testified with questions about spatial granularity and data safeguards; he urged the committee to confirm how rural incidents would be masked to avoid inadvertent identification.
Committee members asked technical questions about how location data are represented (latitude/longitude precision), role-based access, and audit logs. Ferguson and Drucker said data are transmitted via an API as latitude/longitude and that ODMAP enforces user verification and maintains audit logs of who queried the system.
Chair Liebling and other sponsors said the amendment clarifies exactly which EMS fields will be shared and aims to protect individual privacy while giving public-health officials timely information to respond to overdose clusters. House File 1429, as amended, was recommended to pass and be placed on the general register by voice vote.
