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:
- Developing strategies that seek to enhance uptake of evidence-based practices by providers
- Identifying and evaluating dissemination strategies for evidence-based treatment for opioid use and co-occurring mental health conditions or pain in a variety of settings
- Exploring changes and variations in service delivery environments that may affect delivery of high-quality, patient-centered services
- Developing and testing methods to adjust for patient complexity such that different providers can be fairly compared
- Implementing state-of-the-art data collection and analysis technologies to improve the quality and timeliness of data
- Developing and validating interventions to reduce behavioral health practitioners’ emotional stressors, such as burnout or compassion fatigue
- Developing resources to provide training to practitioners in various settings
- Tailoring and testing screening strategies for post-traumatic stress disorder
- Comparing the effectiveness of combined treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and opioid use disorder simultaneously or sequentially
- 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: Sarah Duffy, 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)