School of Pharmacy receives $7.8 million grant to fight opioid addiction

Pitt’s School of Pharmacy’s Program Evaluation and Research Unit received a five-year, $7.8 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to improve the quality of treatment for patients with opioid use disorder.

With the grant money, PERU will establish the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Measures Center at Pitt, which will focus on developing and implementing measurement-based care into 20 community opioid treatment programs across Pennsylvania. Their goals are to enhance treatment access, promote recovery and reduce fatal overdoses across the commonwealth, according to UPMC. 

“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,” Renee Cloutier, principal investigator and research scientist at PERU, said to UPMC. “Successful results will set the stage for broader implementation and dissemination that has the potential to transform patient care across Pennsylvania and the country.”

To enhance the quality of data that is collected and used, PERU will expand on an existing partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ Centers of Excellence for Opioid Use Disorder to integrate measurement-based care into existing treatment practices and workflows, according to UPMC. The new program will examine implementation effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and clinical effectiveness of the treatment practices, including reduction in patient symptoms and treatment retention. 

UPMC said this 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.” The HEALing Measures Center will also include collaborations between researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Research Triangle Institute International, as well as community partners at the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, UPMC and the Community Care Behavioral Health Organization.