The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking applications for the HEAL Initiative, which aims to address the opioid crisis and overdose events by supporting action-oriented research. The goal of this initiative is to accelerate the translation of addiction epidemiology, prevention, treatment, and recovery research into practice. Proposed studies may target individual, provider, organizational, community, or system levels. The initiative prioritizes replicable and scalable approaches for accelerating the routine use of effective, evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery interventions and services.
• Research may deploy a variety of methods and approaches, including identifying and characterizing malleable factors, developing and testing interventions and implementation strategies, and deploying collaborative data science approaches.
• Studies may take place across various settings, including substance use disorder treatment, healthcare, criminal justice, social and human services, educational settings, pain clinics, pharmacies, victim services, workplaces, and community settings.
• Intervention studies are not required, but applications are encouraged to use a range of methods and approaches, including multidisciplinary and innovative methods.
• The initiative expects investigators to engage relevant end-users in study conceptualization, design, execution, and interpretation, and to provide a conceptual and/or pragmatic framework and clear vision for how the research can be sustained beyond the life of the grant.