El Paso County Forms Overdose Fatality Review Team as Deaths Rise

El Paso County is one of nine Colorado counties launching a pilot program to examine overdose deaths one case at a time, a review board being assembled as the county's own fatality figures move opposite to the rest of the country.

The El Paso County Board of Health approved the panel unanimously after some debate, and members are being drawn from the county health department, the coroner's office, local law enforcement and two community providers, Serenity Recovery Connection and Peak View Behavioral Health. The work is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the county says the format follows guidelines set out in state statute.

"The goal is to improve community health and reduce preventable overdose deaths," Dacia Hudson, who directs the Community Health Promotion Division at El Paso County Public Health, told the board at a recent presentation.

What the board will actually review

Colorado's childhood fatality review teams are required to evaluate every unnatural death. The overdose fatality review board will operate differently. It will choose cases using criteria that are still being drafted, and Hudson said the panel might take up a cluster of deaths in one location or a group of deaths among people of a particular age.

Emma Bernick, an injury and violence prevention planner at the health department and co-chair of the board alongside County Coroner Emily Russell-Kinsley, described the mandate as deliberately open-ended.

"It's really intended for the community to use it as a tool for whatever is most effective," Bernick said.

The board is meant to present its findings to policymakers. No schedule has been set for public reports or presentations, which leaves the question of disclosure unresolved for now.

A county moving against a national trend

The coroner's report for 2025 counted 178 accidental overdose deaths in El Paso County, an increase of 16% over the previous year. Preliminary figures for the first half of 2026 put the county at 124 deaths.

That puts the county and the state out of step with the national picture. Overdose deaths across the United States have been falling since a peak around the COVID-19 pandemic, and the national average decline last year was 14%. Colorado was among only a small handful of states to record a significant increase.

The gap is the reason the review model exists. Standard death certificates record a cause and a manner of death, but they rarely capture what preceded it — how a person was released from custody or treatment, whether a prescription was filled, whether there was any contact with the treatment system at all. Fatality review is designed to read those details across many cases at once and turn them into recommendations for the agencies that can act on them.

Skepticism over what a review can deliver

County Commissioner Carrie Geitner questioned the program during its approval. She said reviews of this kind tend to lean on "political ideologies" to explain the factors behind a death, and that the organizations taking part tend to recommend their own services as the answer.

"The question to me is: how useful is it?" Geitner said. She voted for the pilot anyway, saying she thought the premise was "worth a shot."

Bernick said the model itself is well established rather than experimental. Overdose fatality review, she said, is "a nationally recognized evidence-based model" that has been implemented in other states — which is the argument the county is leaning on as it writes its own case-selection rules.

A prevention office still building its drug portfolio

The review board is a new line of work for a health department whose Substance Use Prevention Program has concentrated on tobacco use among young people. Over the past year the agency has branched into alcohol and marijuana prevention, but drug use is not currently part of its education model, Hudson said. The county's publicly available overdose data, which includes death demographics and hospitalization figures, runs only through 2024.

El Paso County also distributes naloxone, the medication that reverses an opioid overdose. In 2024 the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment restricted how the drug is allocated after one-time funding ran out, and the county now passes its share to priority organizations under the state's guidelines.

Reversal medication treats overdoses rather than the opioid use disorder behind them, which is the boundary the review board is meant to respect. It is not a treatment body. Its output, if it works as designed, is a set of findings about where the local system fails.

What the panel can and cannot change

Fatality review does not reopen investigations or revisit individual cases. Its value is meant to be upstream: spotting a contaminated batch of supply, a gap in discharge planning, a cluster of deaths in one neighborhood or among one age group.

Whether the El Paso County board produces anything usable will depend on the criteria it writes, on whether its findings reach the people who allocate money, and on the county's willingness to say publicly what it learns. The panel starts work with one piece of evidence already in hand — its own numbers, which are rising while most of the country's are not.