Case Study: City of Surrey achieves real-time opioid outbreak detection and targeted response with Qlik

Understanding real-time incident data addresses urgent needs while helping to identify gaps for future initiatives

The City of Surrey faced a growing opioid crisis and needed a way for first responders and partner agencies to distinguish real outbreaks from unrelated incidents and trigger faster, coordinated responses when contaminated drugs caused clusters of overdoses. Fire Chief Len Garis sought a reliable, real-time system to detect anomalous spikes in respiratory or cardiac events so authorities could act with precision.

Working with local partner Gingo, Surrey deployed a Qlik Sense app with geoanalytics to perform real-time surveillance, flagging and emailing stakeholders when four cardiac events occur within an hour inside a 1 km area. The system improved outbreak detection and revealed deeper trends—overdoses declined but deaths rose—leading to a new wastewater spectrographic partnership with Statistics Canada for neighborhood-level drug profiling and plans to integrate more health and treatment data to enable targeted interventions.

City of Surrey

Len Garis

Chief