U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Optimizing the Quality, Reach, and Impact of Addiction Services
Overview
The Research Need
Interventions to prevent and treat opioid use disorder and overdose are only valuable if they are useful and effective in real-world settings. Barriers include stigma, provider awareness, and other health care system problems.
About the Program
This program supports action-oriented research to accelerate the translation of research to practice. The research focuses on identifying barriers and strengths at the levels of individuals, communities, and health care systems. It supports implementation science, hybrid implementation/effectiveness trials, and dissemination studies to improve the quality of care for all people with addiction.
The program also supports research to create feasible, efficient quality measurement and management systems. These systems will help clinicians and programs improve, as well as facilitate the ability of patients, families, and payors to compare and select qualified health care providers. The research also aims to expand care for opioid use disorder through innovative service delivery models tailored to individuals who have been victims of violence, through targeted service settings and screening for post-traumatic stress disorder.
This research addresses staffing shortages, emotional stressors in this workforce, workforce diversity, and disparities in care by promoting recruitment, training, and retention of behavioral health professionals.
Open Funding Opportunities
Research Examples
Research examples supported by this program include:
- Assessing the effectiveness of an innovative peer support specialist intervention to help individuals from rural and underserved communities initiate and stay in OUD treatment
- Evaluating the uptake, usability, and equity of a multicomponent clinical decision support intervention to increase initiation of medication treatment for OUD in the emergency department
- Developing a hospital patient navigation protocol that can be scaled up to address OUD treatment linkage and continuity after hospitalization
- Supporting a quality measurement and management research center that provides performance feedback to support and encourage leadership and staff of treatment clinics to improve practice
- Developing provider-level quality measures for OUD using Medicaid administrative data and patient-reported outcomes
- Testing whether identifying and initiating treatment of PTSD in people receiving OUD treatment in jail can increase these individuals’ likelihood of starting and staying in medication treatment for OUD after release
- Evaluating the delivery of evidence-based interventions to address PTSD for women seeking OUD treatment who have experienced intimate partner violence to determine if integrated treatment can help retain the women in medication treatment for OUD
- Adapting the Stress First Aid intervention for harm reduction workers and testing the impact on social support, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, use of mental health care, engagement, and turnover
- Adapting peer recovery support services for use in outpatient substance use treatment settings and testing the impact on helping people with OUD achieve long-term recovery
- Testing whether embedding behavioral health specialists into primary care visits, introducing case management and electronic clinical decision support tools, and reducing stigma will increase delivery of substance use disorder treatment to adolescents
- City College of New York – New York
- Clemson University – South Carolina
- Friends Research Institute – Pennsylvania
- Geisinger Medical Center – Pennsylvania
- Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis – Indiana
- University of Arizona – Arizona
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences – Arkansas
- University of Texas at Austin – Texas
- University of Wisconsin–Madison – Wisconsin
- Yale University – Connecticut
Contact
Quality Initiative: Lindsey Martin, Ph.D., NIDA
Translation to Practice: Carrie Mulford, Ph.D., NIDA
Participating NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
- National Institute of Mental Health
- National Institute on Aging
- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
View Other Research Programs in This Focus Area
- Behavioral Research to Improve Medication-Based Treatment (BRIM)
- Enhancing the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network to Address Opioids
- Harm Reduction Approaches to Reduce Overdose Death
- HEALing Communities Study
- Improving Delivery of Healthcare Services for Polysubstance Use
- Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network
- Native Collective Research Effort to Enhance Wellness (N CREW) Program: Addressing Overdose, Substance Use, Mental Health, and Pain
- Recovery Research Networks
- The Continuum of Care in Hospitalized Patients with Opioid Use Disorder and Infectious Complications of Drug Use (CHOICE)