Meet Vaishnavi Moturi | Founder of ODConnect

We had the good fortune of connecting with Vaishnavi Moturi and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Vaishnavi, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
Amid the alarming growth in Fentanyl cases and the growth of a public health crisis in the form of the opioid epidemic, in my community and across the nation, I created ODConnect, a novel, robust, scalable software aiming to consolidate information regarding overdoses and alert authorities of an overdose in a timely manner.

This problem was especially pressing because of how seemingly intractable of a problem it posed for authorities, hospitals, police departments, and county sheriffs. I spoke with Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner, at his office and learned that not only is it difficult to reconcile overdose data between government organizations but it is also challenging to prevent teenagers and young students from being entrapped in the web of social media.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
ODConnect ultimately aims to preemptively monitor social media to alert authorities of activities flagged by the system and conducts predictive forecasting of clusters that might need community outreach by local volunteer organizations – thus another aspect of ODConnect is to help local nonprofits connect with other nonprofits to collectively alleviate this public health crisis affecting millions of Americans every single day.

Currently, ODConnect has an integrated, interactive dashboard of opioid overdose trends in nearly every county of every state of America and conducts novel analyses of the data trends to understand how the county is performing in comparison to adjacent countries to develop insights into whether or not certain negative trends are isolated to certain counties.

An important aspect of ODConnect is “Ask OdConnect” a GPT-powered chatbot able to answer questions regarding statistics on opioid deaths, emergency visits related to opioid overdoses, as well as opioid prescriptions providing an invaluable tool for nonprofits and public health departments to correlate opioid prescriptions with emergency visits and opioid deaths.

Our patent-pending web application has reached hundreds of users and we are piloting our toolkit with groups of nonprofits and public health departments interested in partnering!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We would like to thank Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner for his valuable advice on implementing the web application as well as information on just how complex the overdose epidemic is and how interdepartmental cooperation is required to combat this crisis. We also want to thank the Collin County Sheriff’s office for their collaboration and for providing ODConnect with inspiration for app implementation.

And of course, a big thank you to Shoutout DFW for featuring ODConnect’s story and spreading our message and work to the community!

Website: https://www.odconnect.org/

Other: Phone Number: 972 469 4274