A University of Colorado Department of Medicine faculty member is a co-author of a recently published article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the largest addiction prevention and treatment implementation study ever conducted, occurring in 67 communities in the country.
The study, called the HEALing Communities Study, launched in 2019 with the aim of reducing opioid overdose deaths by implementing evidence-based practices selected by communities. Supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the NIDA awarded $343.7 million to fund the study, which was implemented in four states: Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio.
Across the four states, each of the 67 communities chose which evidence-based practice strategies they wanted to implement. These strategies fell under the following categories: overdose education and distribution of naloxone (a medication that reverses an opioid overdose), prescription opioid safety, and the use of medications for the treatment of opioid use disorder.
By random selection, 34 communities were chosen to implement the strategies from January 2020 through June 2022, while 33 communities were on wait-list control, meaning they were delayed in getting the intervention and implemented their strategies from July 2022 to December 2023.
Passionate about helping vulnerable populations, Josh Barocas, MD, was among the study’s investigators. Ultimately, they found the opioid death rates were similar in the intervention group and the control group. This means the intervention did not result in a statistically significant reduction in opioid-related overdose deaths.
“This is why you do science — not because you know the answer, but because you’re trying to figure out the answer. It doesn’t mean that you don’t learn something, regardless of the answer,” says Barocas, an associate professor in the divisions of General Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases.
“I hope that people don’t look at this study and have the takeaway that the intervention was a waste of time, because the outcome was only one part of all of this,” he adds. “This study changed the research paradigm in those four states by getting researchers and community members to partner in a bi-directional, symbiotic process.”
We recently spoke with Barocas to discuss the study, its findings, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for more community-engaged research.