Abstract
Substance use disorders are a major health challenge facing the US, with 76,000 drug overdose deaths in the year ending April 2020, an increase of 56percent from 2015. Opioids are blamed for a majority of those deaths. The coronavirus pandemic is compounding the epidemic, with more than 40 states reporting an increase in overdose mortality since the onset of the public health emergency. In the case of opioids, federal and state governments have stepped up efforts to address the epidemic by discouraging risky opioid prescribing and expanding access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) and harm reduction services.
In addition, governments and foundations have expanded their funding of research aimed at devising and testing new interventions to address the opioid epidemic. This research funding typically takes the form of time-limited grants to test the new interventions, after which communities, clinicians, and others must find resources to replace the grant funding.
A key question is what happens after the grant funding ends. Will these new interventions be financially sustainable? If not, they may not be maintained in the organizations testing them and may not be taken up by the wider health care system—meaning, they won’t have any lasting impact on the opioid epidemic or substance use more generally. This post considers how to ensure the financial sustainability of effective new interventions, focusing particularly on psychosocial and organizational interventions.