ROCHESTER — Beginning in January, a team will meet regularly to review cases of overdose deaths in Olmsted County.
The goal is to identify new, locally tailored opportunities for substance use prevention and intervention work, said Monica Ziebell, team lead for the county’s Drug and Alcohol Response Team.
“Getting more specific details for our county, specifically, will help us identify those needs,” Ziebell said. “What works in a different county isn’t necessarily what’s going to be applicable here.”
The overdose fatality review team — made up of representatives from law enforcement, health care, public health, substance use disorder treatment, Child & Family Services and more — will confidentially examine not just a person’s fatal overdose, but their whole life.
“We’re interviewing next of kin,” Ziebell said. “We are going to be looking at: Did this person have … services such as probation, (Child Protective Services) involvement, youth behavioral health? Where they admitted to the emergency room? How many overdoses have they had?”
By reviewing a person’s life, the team can look at gaps or moments when that person could have benefited from prevention or intervention efforts — insights that could turn into strategies for the wider community.
“Maybe it is something that we could be doing in schools that would impact folks in childhood,” said Abby Tricker, an Olmsted County Public Health Services community health specialist, “or maybe it’s something when they go in for a health care appointment, that we could be doing some kind of screening differently.”
Ziebell and Tricker spoke about the review team, as well as a new overdose spike response team plan, at an
Olmsted County Board of Commissioners meeting
on Tuesday, Nov. 4. The work is supported by the county’s opioid settlement funds, which were also used to create the
in 2024.
As previously reported by the Post Bulletin, the spike response team will respond to clusters of overdoses, coordinating communication between state and local agencies as they address the issue. Tricker said there will be plans for different tiers of overdose spikes, monitored by the Minnesota Department of Health.
“We’re hoping that that plan can be created by the end of this year,” Tricker said. “In January, we can test the plan in a tabletop exercise and then be prepared for if there is a spike.”
With the review team and spike response team in action, Ziebell said Olmsted County will be responding to overdoses and substance use at multiple levels.
“The micro level is the DART team working directly with individuals,” Ziebell said. “The mezzo level is going to be the spike response team, and then the macro level is that Overdose Fatality Review.”
In 2024, per the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office, 19 people died from accidental drug overdoses, down from a recent high of 56 in 2022. However, Tricker said, statewide overdose deaths appear, so far, to be increasing in 2025, with larger bumps in June and September.
“Having the overdose fatality review team up and running,” Tricker added, “we might be able to better understand why that is happening.”
