Enhancing Access to Timely Research to Prevent HIV Transmission and Effectively Treat Substance Use

The purpose of this proposed Avenir Award is to achieve widespread population health improvements in preventing HIV transmission and overdose amongst people living with substance use disorders (SUD) by mitigating barriers that hinder linkage to healthcare and social services. One in five individuals living with HIV has a comorbid SUD, highlighting the importance of increasing connectivity to low-barrier services to prevent HIV transmission and overdose and increase treatment initiation. While rigorous scientific evidence about the effectiveness and safety of these services exists, the timeliness and user-friendliness of information is limited. Dissemination strategies are critically needed to increase availability of current knowledge about effective HIV and SUD services to help prevent HIV transmission and improve health outcomes for people living with SUD. This proposal is aligned with the goals of the Avenir Award and NIDA’s strategic objectives to improve the implementation of evidence-based services in real-world settings by overcoming upstream barriers that prevent or slow receipt of health services. This Avenir Award research proposes innovative new methods to create more efficient and effective dissemination approaches, maximizing the return on investments in HIV/SUD research. This project draws on interdisciplinary methods from health law and dissemination science while being guided by the Exploration, Implementation, Preparation, Sustainment Framework (EPIS) to reconceptualize how researchers identify dissemination opportunities across contexts to improve SUD and HIV population health outcomes. This project will culminate in: (1) a transferable and efficient tool to identify evidence use behaviors and needs, (2) message frames, (3) dissemination strategies, and (4) a new agenda for dissemination science research to support user-friendly availability of SUD/HIV research and to create new measures for investigating dissemination outcomes. This project will rapidly build effective methods for disseminating science while increasing connectivity to services that can reduce HIV transmission and overdose to improve health outcomes for people living with SUD.