Interactive tool can help rural communities fight opioid crisis

A screenshot of the USDA's Community Assessment Tool. Click here to view the interactive version. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched an interactive tool to help rural community leaders create strategies to address the opioid epidemic. "The Community Assessment Tool enables users to overlay substance misuse data against socioeconomic, census and other public information," the High Plains Journal reports. "This data will help leaders, researchers and policymakers assess what actions will be most effective in addressing the opioid crisis at the local level."

The tool is free to use and available to the public. It was created by the Rural Development division of the USDA in partnership with the Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, which is part of the non-partisan NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago.