A Novel Platform to Identify and Treat Transitional Age Youth With Alcohol Use Disorder

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Project Summary This proposal seeks to determine the feasibility and acceptability of developing a data management platform (DMP) tailored for researchers and health departments attempting to identify young adults with alcohol use disorder (AUD) who are not enrolled in 4-year colleges. This is an urgent area of research; rates of alcohol misuse peak among young adults. Due to convenience, most participant samples have involved young adults enrolled in 4-year colleges. Research is urgently needed to identify young adults with AUD who are not enrolled in 4-year colleges to provide them with potential interventions and reduce the health inequity of this research. Top technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, have become experts at developing DMPs that target consumers relevant to a product who are statistically likely to click on advertisements and purchase the product. For example, pharmaceutical companies can use a HIPAA-compliant DMP to identify mobile devices owned by individuals statistically likely to have depression (i.e., “look-alike audience targeting) by referencing a variety of health (e.g., pharmacy claims), digital behavior (e.g, websites visited) and demographic datasets to help improve precisely when, how, and what type of depression medication or related advertisement to deliver to each device to increase patient interest. However, to our knowledge, no DMP exists that can be used to help identify individuals with AUD to increase their enrollment in research. This means that health departments and researchers attempting to identify and enroll young adults with AUD need to either recruit in person (which is time-consuming and lacks scalability) or through the use of Facebook and other broad traditional DMPs, which is inefficient and not tailored (i.e., it wastes time and money paying for ads that will be shown to many people without OUD). We seek to create (and evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of) the first DMP tailored for researchers and health departments attempting to identify young adults with AUD who are not enrolled in 4- year colleges. Through partnerships and preliminary research we have developed with industry advertising partners during the COVID-19 pandemic, we will leverage our team’s experience and data from previous NIDA-funded SBIRs to help substance use researchers, and a NIDA-funded R34 suggesting that patients would find this approach acceptable. Beyond this Phase 1 application, this approach might later be scaled (and tailored to almost all clinical conditions) to be the first known DMP for increasing enrollment of participants to health-related research.