Michigan Rebuilds Opioid Dashboard to Track Settlement Goals

Michigan's health department has rebuilt the public dashboard it uses to show whether its opioid settlement spending is working, reorganizing the tracker around the four pillars of the state's substance use response framework and tying each goal on the page to a specific measurement. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced the update to the Michigan Opioid Strategy Progress Metrics Dashboard on October 9.

The dashboard now groups goals under primary prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery support — the four pillars of Michigan's Substance Use Disorder Response Framework — and displays the metrics the state will use to judge progress under each one.

"Every goal on this dashboard is tied to a specific, measurable way we can track the impact of our work," said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, the state's chief medical executive and chair of the Michigan Opioids Task Force. "We want the investments we make in prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery to be guided by data and made public for everyone to see. This dashboard helps us see where our work is making a difference and where we need to focus more attention."

What the metrics are meant to measure

MDHHS said the goals were selected from recommendations by task force subcommittees made up of appointed volunteers with expertise and experience related to substance use disorder. Each goal is tracked over time with evidence-based metrics chosen on five criteria: how well a metric matches the goal, its usefulness, whether the data are actually available, how responsive it is to the state's investments, and its relevance to health equity.

The department said the dashboard will be updated routinely as new information becomes available. That is the part of the announcement with the most practical weight, because a metrics page is only as valuable as its refresh schedule — the recurring complaint about settlement oversight nationally has been not that numbers are missing but that they arrive too late to change spending decisions.

$1.8 billion, split two ways

Michigan is slated to receive more than $1.8 billion from national opioid settlements by 2040, with half going to the state and half distributed directly to county, city and township governments. That split is why a state dashboard has to be read alongside local spending records: roughly half the money is committed by officials who never appear in a Lansing press release.

The state also points readers to programming proposed under the Michigan Opioids Healing and Recovery Fund, the account that holds the state's share.

Why the tracker matters beyond Michigan

Michigan's update lands in a stretch of unusually hard scrutiny for settlement spending. New Jersey's comptroller and outside investigations have documented towns using abatement dollars on vehicles, concerts and surveillance equipment, and this month a Gloucester County township was found to have reported $170,446.70 in drug education spending that its own records show went to police SUVs and license plate cameras (earlier coverage). Against that backdrop, the value of a state-level dashboard is that it makes the "responsive to investments" criterion auditable rather than rhetorical.

Michigan has its own history of the gap between appropriation and delivery. Earlier reporting found substantial settlement money unspent years after payments began, and the state budgeted more than $131 million from the Opioid Healing and Recovery Fund for fiscal 2026 to move prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery services into communities.

The state has also been able to point to outcomes: Michigan's opioid overdose death rate has fallen by more than 35 percent since 2023, a decline officials attribute to coordination and investment. Michigan residents looking for medication for opioid use disorder or other substance use disorder care can find program information through the state's opioid settlement site.

The revised dashboard does not settle the argument over whether Michigan is spending its share well. It does put the state's own stated benchmarks in one place, which is the version of accountability the county-level spending disputes keep circling back to.