FORE Announces $4.8 Million in Grants That Support Innovative Solutions to Ending the Opioid Crisis
Today, FORE announced 11 new grants totaling $4.8 million to organizations tackling some of the opioid crisis’ most intractable problems. The projects, all part of FORE’s new Innovation Program, were selected based on a national request for proposals that yielded 479 submissions from around the country.
“Our new Innovation Program is designed to generate and support new approaches to longstanding problems that have impeded progress in addressing the opioid crisis — including how to reduce stigma, generate more timely and actionable data, and help people transitioning from treatment to long-term recovery,” says FORE President Karen A. Scott, M.D., M.P.H.
The program supports projects that combine strategies from diverse fields and engage multidisciplinary teams. Some aim to build empathy for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) by offering training to professionals in the fields of health care, criminal justice, law, and other areas. Another set of grants will generate actionable data — for example, real-time changes in the drug supply — so that government leaders can prevent drug overdoses and create more responsive policies. Another project, focused on promoting recovery, will help OUD patients understand their rights around urine drug screening and partner with their providers to use drug testing in therapeutic, rather than punitive, ways.
Professional Education and Training to Address Stigma
Agency for Substance Abuse Prevention (Oxford, Alabama)
Faith-Based Support Specialist Training
Principal Investigator: Seyram Selase, ICPS, CPM
$164,470
Friends Research Institute Inc. (Baltimore, Maryland)
Doing Right at Birth: Reducing Stigma and Improving Recovery through Professional Education and Around Child Welfare Reporting
Principal Investigators: Mishka Terplan, MD, MPH and Sarah Roberts, DrPH
$596,921
Montefiore Medical Center (Bronx, New York)
Advancing Equity in Urine Drug Testing in Primary Care-Based Buprenorphine Treatment
Principal Investigator: Mariya Masyukova, MD, MS
$298,699
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Foundation Inc. (North Dartmouth, Massachusetts)
Novel Organizational Simulation Training to Improve Graduate’s Mastery & Attitudes (NO STIGMA)
Principal Investigators: Mary McCurry, PhD, Monika Schuler, PhD, and Jennifer Viveiros, PhD
$591,485
Weill Cornell Medicine (New York, NY)
Improving Physicians’ Self-Awareness and Attitudes Towards Patients with Substance Use Disorders via a Role-Playing Virtual Tool
Principal Investigator: Jonathan Avery, MD
$199,516
Timely and Actionable Data
Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
Understanding Drug Use Within a Rapidly Changing Supply: An Ethnographic and Toxicologic Investigation to Improve Overdose Prevention and Supply Surveillance Communication
Principal Investigators: Alexandra Collins, PhD and Rachel Wightman, MD
$564,319
Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
Precision Epidemiology and the Opioid Crisis: Using Next-Generation Geospatial Analyses to Guide Community-Level Responses in Diverse and Segregated Metropolitan Regions
Principal Investigators: John Mantsch, PhD, Rina Ghose, PhD, and Peter Brunzelle
$600,000
Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Stop Overdose Deaths: Monitoring Comprehensiveness of State Policy to Prevent Overdose Deaths
Principal Investigators: Scott Burris, JD, and Nicolas Terry, LLM
$600,000
Tufts University School of Medicine (Boston, Massachusetts)
Syndromic Surveillance of the Opioid Crisis in Lowell, Massachusetts: Data to Action and Evaluation
Principal Investigators: Shikhar Shrestha, PhD, Thomas Stopka, PhD, and Jennifer Pustz, PhD
$475,521
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, North Carolina)
Randomized Trial and Analytic Chemistry Innovations to Optimize Drug Alerts
Principal Investigator: Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD
$599,488
Supporting the Transition from Treatment to Recovery
New York State Psychiatric Institute / Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, Inc. (New York, New York)
Health Technology Applications to Support the Integration of Care for Individuals with Substance Use Disorder
Principal Investigator: Harold Pincus, MD
$94,595
You can view descriptions of our Innovation Program projects, as well as all of our grants, in the Our Grantees section.