Identifying and classifying opioid-related overdoses: A validation study.

Code-based algorithms developed to detect opioid-related overdoses and classify them according to heroin involvement perform well. Algorithms for classifying suicides/attempts and abuse-related opioid overdoses perform adequately for use for research, particularly given the complexity of classifying such overdoses. The NLP-enhanced algorithms for suicides/suicide attempts and abuse-related overdoses perform significantly better than code-based algorithms and are appropriate for use in settings that have data and capacity to use NLP.