The Brandeis Opioid Resource Connector serves community stakeholders working to combat the opioid epidemic. It is a product of the Brandeis Opioid Policy Research Collaborative.
The heart of the Brandeis Opioid Resource Connector is our curated list of Program Models that address the many aspects of the opioid crisis.
Successful responses to the opioid crisis involve coordination among agencies and stakeholders within a community, ensuring that essential interventions across the continuum of care are implemented with available resources.
Understanding the numbers behind the opioid epidemic, and demonstrating how it affects a community, are critical steps in determining what approaches should be prioritized, and in informing local efforts.
This section contains links to a curated list of external resources related to actionable responses to the opioid crisis.
An important step in countering the opioid crisis is to prevent new cases.
Prevention often includes providing treatment providers, educators, parents, and potential substance users with the knowledge and skills they need to prevent harmful behaviors.
Research indicates that comprehensive, effective treatment for opioid use disorder increases one’s chances of wellness.
There is a range of evidence-based approaches from FDA-approved medications to cognitive-behavioral interventions to mutual aid groups. Treatment planning should be tailored to the individual.
We know that opioid use disorder can be a chronic condition and recurrence is common. Recovery is the process by which people sustain wellness by focusing on improving one’s health, sense of purpose, and connection with community.
Harm reduction aims to reduce the adverse health, economic, and social consequences of substance use. Effective harm reduction approaches are designed to be practical, feasible, and safe.
This community-based tool consists of a two-day workshop that brings together stakeholders in the criminal justice, behavioral health, and recovery support systems to identify strengths, gaps, and priorities in their communities, and can strengthen the community response to the opioid crisis.
Sequential Intercept Mapping (SIM) identifies the vital places in the system where best practices should be implemented, thereby increasing a person’s chances of recovery and decreasing recidivism.
This is an academic paper that examines the social roots of the opioid crisis, creating a social determinants of health framework to better understand opioid-related harms across the drug-use continuum. Findings suggest that policymakers and public health leaders should develop partnerships with people who use drugs, incorporate harm reduction strategies, and reverse drug criminalization policies.
This is a statistical brief from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) that describes how counties that have high versus low population rates of opioid-related hospital use differ with regard to social determinants of health (SDOH). The SDOH studied include social, educational, and economic characteristics; physical infrastructure; and healthcare characteristics. Results show that counties with high population rates of opioid-related hospital use have a meaningfully different SDOH profile.
This is a toolkit from the Rural Health Information Hub that compiles evidence-based and promising models and resources to support organizations implementing programs to address social determinants of health in rural communities across the United States. The toolkit is broken up into seven modules.
This is a toolkit from the American Hospital Association (AHA) that provides a report and related resources on eight different domains of social determinants of health: Food, housing, transportation, health behaviors, violence, education, social support, and employment.
This is an academic paper that gives an overview of studies that have examined the association between socioeconomic characteristics and opioid-related overdose deaths. Nearly all reviewed studies found a connection between a socioeconomic variable and overdose, supporting the Deaths of Despair hypothesis.
This is a report that describes how State Offices of Rural Health (SORH) are aiding their rural communities in responding to the addiction crisis, while meeting the expectations of SORH grants. Initiatives across the nation are highlighted, with a focus on collection and dissemination of information, coordination of rural health activities, and technical assistance.
This toolkit introduces the ASAM criteria, a framework for organizing addiction treatment systems and a foundation for improving the quality of care and addressing the gap between the efficacy of treatment in clinical trials and effectiveness in real world settings. By rooting substance use disorder (SUD) services in a common framework such as the ASAM criteria, states can ensure that organizations are "speaking the same language" when it comes to SUD prevention and treatment.
This is a report which describes lessons learned from states that acted as models for statewide approaches that prevent and address adverse childhood experiences and development of trauma-informed policies. The report also highlights the goals, policies, and programs developed and launched by states that were selected for the project.
This report published by the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) gives an overview on the connection between opioid use disorder and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). The report also highlights state approaches to NAS data collection, analysis, and cross-agency data linkage, and how states leverage these data to inform better policy and improve health outcomes for both parents and infants.
This is a report from the CDC that identifies state strategies to improve outcomes for pregnant and postpartum women with opioid use disorder and infants prenatally exposed to substances, including opioids. It discusses strategies focused on access to and coordination of quality services, including approaches such as telemedicine that are useful in rural areas. In addition, there is discussion of strategies related to provider awareness and training among other topics.
This is a report from the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) that discusses how child-serving agencies are responding to the opioid crisis. It includes states’ strategies to support young children and families impacted by opioid use disorder (OUD), available state and federal funding sources for these initiatives, and key considerations for states working to improve services and outcomes for this vulnerable population.
