Background: As part of the Collaborative Research on Addiction at NIH (CRAN) initiative, NIDA and NIAAA join to issue this FOA. The purpose of this FOA is to support the development and testing of interventions, models, and/or frameworks that examine system-level implementation of evidence-based interventions, guidelines, or principles to improve the delivery, uptake, quality, and sustainability of substance use prevention and treatment interventions and services.
Implementation science is a growing field. An early area of emphasis for addiction health services researchers was to move beyond training of individual clinicians or service providers as a default implementation strategy, and develop interventions that would achieve broader, sustainable implementation at the organizational level. Some research has begun to look at intra-organizational implementation strategies to further accelerate the implementation of evidence-based practices (or de-implementation of unsupported or harmful practices). However, to date, a major remaining challenge is how to facilitate – in a systematic, scalable, sustainable way – the delivery of evidence-based prevention and treatment services at a system level.
This FOA seeks research projects that will move beyond a focus on how individual clinics or organizations implement a given change, and beyond implementation of interventions that target only a single evidence-based intervention (EBI). The purpose of this FOA is to identify efficacious and effective strategies or techniques for facilitating systems-level change within or across networks of organizations to promote broad use of evidence-based practices for the prevention and/or treatment of substance use disorders or HIV. This FOA seeks applications that can address implementation on a larger, system-level scale that is more analogous to the way policy changes lead to system-level changes in prevention and treatment service delivery. Achieving system-level improvements requires implementation strategies that are sufficiently flexible to address the variation in settings and context across a given system, but that are also generalizable across settings. The multi-site pilot and feasibility studies supported by this FOA should contribute both practical and conceptual advances. In practical terms, these studies should be aimed at developing new strategies that could be used to effectively deploy guidelines, practices, and policies across entire systems of care. In conceptual terms, these studies should also leverage the multi-site platform to support pilot and feasibility work that is directed at testing implementation science hypotheses, exploring novel methodological approaches, or testing new measures or models that can inform future implementation research in this or other health domains.
Application Due Dates: July 17, 2018; November 13, 2018; July 17, 2019; November 13, 2019; July 17, 2020; November 13, 2020, by 5:00 PM local time of applicant organization.
Letter of Intent Due Dates: 30 days prior to application
URL: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-18-223.html
URL of R01 funding opportunity announcement of same title: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-18-222.html
Filed Under: Funding Opportunities