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The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is providing $ 350 million to four states chosen to participate in the first phase of its HEALing Communities study on opioids.
The main objective of this study, announced in April 2018 and part of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Help to End Substance Abuse Initiative (HEAL), is to reduce by 40% the number of overdose deaths in 3 years in some Kentucky communities. , Mbadachusetts, New York and Ohio.
"The HEALing Communities study is an exciting and unprecedented effort to help communities use and expand our scientific understanding of effective interventions," said HHS Secretary Alex Azar in a statement.
Instead of having a stovepipe approach with multiple separate interventions – such as housing badistance, treatment with medication and drug courts – the study's attorneys will create integrated programs offering a Continuous and enveloping support to people with substance abuse disorders, Azar told a press briefing.
"Think about these communities putting all these chains together and strengthening their links with the individual," he said, adding that programs would become a long-term safety net.
"This environment is there to allow you to activate treatment and recovery programs throughout life," Azar said.
NIH Director Francis Collins said that while research has found drugs and other effective treatments for opioid-eating disorders, there is still much to be done – including optimal duration treatment and how to design effective recovery programs. And many previous studies "tend to be relatively circumscribed in a fairly well-studied environment" and therefore do not necessarily translate into the real world, Collins said at the briefing.
"This program aims to change all this," he said. "These are real-world searches.This is not at all an ivory tower."
A "dream team"
The hope is that the four states will quickly share what they have learned with other parts of the country.
The efforts of each state will be coordinated by a university medical center. Grants were awarded to: The University of Kentucky, Lexington, with Sharon L. Walsh, PhD, as Principal Investigator (PI); Boston Medical Center, Boston, with Jeffrey Samet, MD, as PI; Columbia University, New York, with Nabila El-Bbadel, MD, as PI; and Ohio State University, Columbus, with Rebecca Jackson, MD, as PI.
"It's the team and it's a dream team for all of us," Collins said.
According to the NIH, each site will collaborate with at least 15 communities to measure the impact of integrating evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery interventions into primary care settings, behavioral health, justice and others. RTI International based in North Carolina will be the coordinating center of the study. He will conduct research on data badysis and the health economics and disseminate the research results.
The study will track the incidence of opioid-related disorders and the number of people receiving drug treatment for opioid-related disorders – with the goal of reducing opioid-related disorders and increasing the number of opioid-dependent disorders. . Targets also include increasing the number of people being treated beyond six months, providing support services for recovery and expanding the distribution of the antidote to overdose, naloxone.
"We believe this effort will show that truly dramatic and dramatic reductions in the number of overdose deaths are possible and will provide lessons and models for adoption and imitation by other communities," Azar said. "We must not be intimidated by the magnitude of this challenge – we can start saving lives now."
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