Findings from Drug-Related Emergency Department Visits, 2021 (Drug Abuse Warning Network - DAWN)

DAWN is a nationwide public health surveillance system that captures data on emergency department (ED) visits related to recent substance use and misuse directly from the electronic health records of participating hospitals. In 2021, the DAWN identified 149,021 drug-related ED visits from 52 participating hospitals. These data were analyzed to (1) generate nationally representative weighted estimates for all drug related ED visits, (2) generate nationally representative weighted estimates for the top five drugs in drug-related ED visits, (3) assess monthly trends and drugs involved in polysubstance ED visits in a subset of sentinel hospitals, and (4) identify drugs new to DAWN’s Drug Reference Vocabulary in 2021.