Using Implementation Interventions and Peer Recovery Support to Improve Opioid Treatment Outcomes in Community Supervision

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Project Summary Deploying law to support, rather than hinder access to treatment requires evidence of which legal levers help and which hurt, and a clear mapping of the state of the law in every applicable jurisdiction. Legal epidemiology – the scientific study and deployment of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury in a population – provides an innovative framework to understanding the positive, negative, and incidental effects of these policy changes on population health. There are no two greater examples representing the pertinence of the impact of law on public health than the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid epidemic in the United States. COVID-19 exacerbated many existing weaknesses in opioid treatment models, especially those serving our most vulnerable populations like the criminal justice- involved population. Following the lead of the Brown University research hub’s project seeking to improve the continuum of evidence-based medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) care for justice involved individuals, researchers at the Center for Public Health Law Research (CPHLR) at the Temple University Beasley School of Law used legal epidemiology and policy surveillance measures, to scientific legal data on COVID-19 laws and policies impacting the individuals with opioid use disorder. Alongside outcome data captured by the Brown University research hub and other JCOIN researchers, the CPHLR legal data is intended to be used to help evaluate the impact of law on MOUD treatment among justice-involved individuals during COVID-19. While this legal data is published and freely available for download for researchers to evaluate the impact of these evolving legal measures on health outcomes over time, more work needs to be done to ensure that this crucial legal data is FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. By relying on this legal data and the research team’s collective expertise in cloud-based platform technology, this project will load-test an innovative Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network architecture and move the existing legal datasets to a more organized centralized data index. This will in turn bring new and innovative functionalities to drastically reduce hosting costs, improve call times for data, and supply easier data harmonization tools for researchers all while aligning with the FAIR principles.