To change policy and practice, and ultimately improve substance use disorder (SUD) treatment system performance, the Center must engage with key stakeholders in a bidirectional manner, focusing on the issues of greatest importance to them and producing timely information and analysis on those issues that can feed directly into the policy process and drive the improvement of system performance in the future.
The aims of the Policy/Dissemination Core are to:
- Strengthen and expand relationships with key stakeholders, including insurers, state Medicaid program staff, directors of state SUD services, leaders of provider organizations, federal policy staff, and organizations representing persons with lived experience of SUD
- Use a bidirectional engagement process with these key stakeholders to select topics for research, produce important and timely new knowledge, and inform the interpretation of our findings; and
- Conduct Center-wide knowledge translation and dissemination activities to ensure timely and accessible access to Center research on topics of greatest importance for policy and practice
Timely topics are informed by stakeholders’ conceptions of short-term pressing issues and those anticipated for the longer-term. We seek to provide key information needed to address those challenges and offer our understanding on emerging issues.
The Policy Core produces targeted, quick turnaround policy analyses that assess and synthesize evidence to provide critical, short-term insights on policy concerns. We also work with stakeholders to consider the science needed on longer-term issues to understand how to tweak current policy or develop policy that requires more fundamental change.
This Core is innovative in its intentional focus to involve policy makers, payers, practitioners, persons with lived experience of SUD, and other stakeholders in all aspects of the research process, from research question identification, to interpretation of findings, and to communication and dissemination to stakeholders to advance policy and practice around systems improvement for SUD. This approach should increase the likelihood of policy and practice impact and of sustainability of innovative practices that require the intertwined delivery and payment systems to work together.