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Welcome to this issue of the HEAL Data2Action (HD2A) Digest! Please share with colleagues, friends, and anyone else you know who might be interested in our work and encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter.

The HD2A Program is moving into its third year with many transitions upon us. This has offered an opportunity to reflect on our successes to date and anticipate advancements for the future. Highlights of our program are being shared with the HEAL Multi-Disciplinary Workgroup at the end of August to celebrate the investment. I am so proud of all the work that you as HD2A Investigators and Support Centers have accomplished. 

• The Program has made its mark, with enhancement of public health dashboards to better illustrate overdose burden, clinical dashboards to identify patients at risk, intensive partner engagement to map new care pathways and resource allocation, simulation models to direct treatment strategies, data linkage to assess care quality, and decision and financing support to enhance delivery of evidence-based interventions.



• Our collaborative work has revealed common themes underlying data-to-action approaches, including the importance of moving levers to support health and community systems change.

• The Board of Partners has provided insights into the importance of leveraging small demonstration projects for scale-up and sustainability. Measures have been made available to support collection of information about implementation factors and outcomes that serve as indicators of delivery and sustainment.

• Data sharing plans have been enhanced with a DMP Tool for supporting HEAL policy compliance and facilitating secondary analysis potential. Tools are generating the ability to assess the cost of strategies at the program, community, and agency level and understand return on investment for data-to-action approaches.

Findings have been disseminated to inform US payment policy for medications to treat opioid use disorder and Medicaid-covered peer support services.

With all of this progress, we can’t help but identify potential clinical, community, economic, and policy impacts of the HD2A efforts, including scalable guideline implementation, new care pathways, innovative implementation strategies, data dashboards, financing models, and data-informed decision making to better allocate resources for health impact. Keep up the great work – I can’t wait to see the progress evidenced in the coming years!

A PowerPoint slide deck is being shared to review these successes – please feel free to borrow slides as you are promoting your own work to help describe the Program. Thank you for your collaborative spirit and efforts in moving the field in a direction so that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are better equipped to work together to use data to inform delivery of evidence-based practice. 

Leveraging Data to Action: Accelerating Emergency Department OUD Care by Improving Data Access and Infrastructure

About This Project:

Emergency departments play a crucial role in identifying and treating opioid use disorder, but they often lack effective data systems to track and improve care. To use emergency department (ED) data and improve research in this area, Yale University researchers have teamed up with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). They created a new tool called "Data-AID" (Data Acceleration and Infrastructure Development to Optimize Emergency OUD Care). This tool helps measure and enhance the prevention and treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) in emergency settings.

Data-AID works by automatically combining electronic health records and other administrative data from emergency departments into ACEP’s Clinical Emergency Department Registry (CEDR). This helps healthcare providers make quick improvements in their local practices. Additionally, the tool will help create a special research dataset for OUD in emergency departments and a public dashboard to monitor public health.

In their first year of work, the researchers developed a prototype of the dashboard with help from a group of technical experts. Next year, they plan to roll out the first version of the dashboard to a group of healthcare providers.

Awards and Recognitions

Congratulations to Dr. Dir, Assistant Professor and licensed clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Indiana University School of Medicine, who supports the Fatal Overdose Review Teams – Research to Enhance Surveillance Systems project (FORTRESS; PIs Aalsma, Reda, and Ray). Dr. Dir was just chosen for the Center for Dissemination and Implementation at Stanford (C-DIAS) Fellowship in Addiction D&I Science. This two year fellowship is for early/mid-career individuals who have a career goal of improving public access to and quality of addiction treatment by leveraging advanced D&I scientific methods. During her C-DIAS fellowship, Dr. Dir will expand on her knowledge and use of implementation strategies for fostering collaboration across systems as well as utilizing community-based participatory research in implementation to maximize potential for sustainability. 

Congratulations to the Heimer/Sabounchi/Heckmann team for their recent Rapid DIMS award. Their project, Using System Dynamics Modeling to Foster Real-time Connections to Care, will implement a novel, scalable, evidence-based intervention (i.e., telehealth platform) at the time of an opioid overdose that links people who have overdosed with access to medication for opioid use disorder, harm reduction services, and recovery supports.

The Rapid DIMS award will help by:

• Supporting key stakeholders involved in the project.
• Developing geospatial tagging to track where participants use the project's QR code for enrollment.
• Automating the enrollment process to improve outreach and reduce errors.

The Rapid DIMS funds will ultimately help in their aim to expand their intervention across Connecticut to enhance access to treatment and reduce overdoses.

Dr. Heimer will be joining Using System Dynamics Modeling to Foster Real-Time Connections to Care as an MPI. Dr. Heimer's research focuses on the health impacts of injection drug use, including syringe exchange programs, virus survival in syringes, and overdose prevention. He evaluates the effectiveness of interventions to mitigate the negative consequences of drug use. Currently, he studies the opioid crisis and its broader impacts on health, including HIV and viral hepatitis. Dr. Heimer is affiliated with Yale University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and has previously led efforts to assess and control emerging infectious diseases. Dr. Heimer received his training in molecular biology and pharmacology at Columbia College (BA) and Yale University (MA, PhD).

The Center for Dissemination and Implementation (CDI) at Stanford University School of Medicine is honored to host the annual Addiction Health Services Research (AHSR) meeting, October 16-18, 2024, in San Francisco, CA. Click here to register now!

• Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder: Population Estimates — United States Via SAMHSA

• Physician Reluctance to Intervene in Addiction: A Systematic Review | Substance Use and Addiction Medicine | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network via JAMA network

• Montana’s Plan To Curb Opioid Overdoses Includes Vending Machines  via KFF

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