A Strategy for Heal Federated Data Ecosystem

The NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, an aggressive effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis, includes a broad range of programs and projects generating large volumes of diverse data. HEAL Initiative awards have been made with the expectation that awardees’ results and data will be shared with broader research communities and the public to promote dissemination of new knowledge and prompt further discoveries. A key principle underlying the HEAL data strategy is to make those data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) for the benefit of researchers and the public. We propose to serve as the HEAL Data Stewardship Group to provide guidance and support to HEAL investigators on readying their data to connect to the HEAL Platform, a secure data access and computing environment. To begin work, we will engage with HEAL Platform developers, HEAL investigators, and others in the research and broader communities to understand the most valuable uses for the HEAL Platform and support those “use cases” through data management efforts. We will then collaborate closely with HEAL Platform developers and HEAL investigators to augment data management efforts where needed, especially for programs not currently working with their own HEAL-funded data-coordinating efforts. Through collaboration with HEAL investigators and an exploration of the work being conducted across the initiative, we will provide long-term data strategy and sustainability guidance to the HEAL Initiative. This will facilitate data access through the HEAL Platform well into the future. Together with the HEAL Platform awardees, our efforts will ensure secure, straightforward access to HEAL results and data to maximize the impact the HEAL Initiative has on addressing opioid misuse, overdose, chronic pain, and related challenges.