Pitt Receives New Grant to Improve Opioid Use Disorder Treatment
Summary
The University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacys Program Evaluation and Research Unit (PERU) has received a five-year $7.9 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to improve quality of care for patients with opioid use disorder across Pennsylvania.The project will establish the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEALing) Measures Center at Pitt, which will focus on developing and implementing measurement-based care into 20 community opioid treatment programs across Pennsylvania with the goal of enhancing treatment access, promoting recovery and reducing fatal overdoses across the commonwealth.Improving the quality of patient care requires full system-wide implementation support, system-wide capacity to focus on patient and provider needs, and empowering providers with clinically useful data, said principal investigator Renee Cloutier, Ph.D., research scientist at PERU in the Pitt School of Pharmacy. Successful results will set the stage for broader implementation and dissemination that has the potential to transform patient care across Pennsylvania and the country.Although opioid overdose deaths in Pennsylvania decreased from 2021 to 2022, opioid use disorder (OUD) and other substance use disorders remain a major public health issue in the commonwealth and across the country. Randomized clinical trials that demonstrate the impact of interventions have very controlled conditions, so often when we translate those findings into practice, we see a reduction in effectiveness because people are complicated. These data will inform ways to increase treatment efficiency and effectiveness, while also providing a roadmap for sustainable ways to scale measurement-based care to new opioid treatment sites.Other principal investigators on the project are Janice Pringle, Ph.D., of PERU, Kelli Scott, Ph.D., of the New England Addiction Technology Transfer Center, and Arni Aldridge, Ph.D., of Research TriangleInstitute (RTI) International. Co-investigators are Erh-Hsuan (Reina) Wang, Ph.D., and Debra Moore, Ph.D., both of PERU.The HEALing Measures Center will also include collaborations between researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and (RTI) International, and community partners at the PA Department of Human Services, the PA Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, UPMC, and the Community Care Behavioral Health Organization.