NIH to Leverage Data Management for Opioid Crisis Research

The NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative is tapping into data management and stewardship expertise to better inform research related to the opioid crisis.

The NIH HEAL Initiative is providing up to $21.4 million over five years to the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and RTI International to help researchers securely prepare and sustain data from more than 500 studies.

The NIH HEAL Initiative is an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions and reduce the impact of the opioid crisis.

The effort includes over 20 distinct programs led by 12 NIH Institutes and Centers. The comprehensive nature of the initiative requires ongoing input and engagement from experts across disciplines and sectors – including data management and stewardship.

While healthcare data has become easier to store and collect, leaders are still working to find ways to maximizing the potential of this collected data.

The industry is working to prepare data in a way that can make it accessible, break down storage siloes while maintaining privacy, and teach researchers and policymakers how to effectively analyze big data resources.

To help accomplish these goals, RENCI and RTI will collaborate with the HEAL-funded team at the University of Chicago on building a cloud-based platform.

The goal is to enable HEAL researchers, other investigators, advocates, providers, and policymakers to easily find NIH HEAL research and data. The platform will also allow these stakeholders to use the data to inform their own research, practice, policies, and programs.

“To be maximally useful, data must be findable to support new research and secondary analyses, as well as to guide education and policy about pain and addiction,” said Rebecca G. Baker, PhD, director of the NIH HEAL Initiative Baker.

“Preparing data to be easily discoverable can be a challenging and resource-intensive task. While most recognize the need to make data FAIR, not all research teams have the resources or expertise to do this. The RENCI/RTI group, in partnership with the Chicago team, will be available to HEAL-funded investigators to augment efforts where needed.”

Being able to quickly share results generated from HEAL and related data will allow the broader community to ask and answer new research questions and conduct secondary analyses. Rapid access to this information will also help stakeholders address evolving challenges around pain management, opioid use and misuse, and overdose.

NIH HEAL Initiative data come from a broad range of resources, including imaging and microscopy, behavior, genomics, pharmacokinetics, and more.

“Providing efficient and secure access for investigators to combine data from different studies should give us a much more accurate overall picture of how challenges around pain management and addiction can be addressed,” said Stan Ahalt, director of RENCI.

“Given the urgency of HEAL's mission, we are thankful to be able to provide expertise that can facilitate discovery of important elements hidden within the data.”  

To bring these hidden elements to light, the RENCI and RTI team will study the existing NIH HEAL Initiative data efforts and collaborations. Through engagements with HEAL, investigators will produce use cases and requirements for working across diverse data types.

“We will ensure that the ecosystem architecture is purpose-built and that the ecosystem team provides the on-hand expertise to address HEAL’s needs as the research evolves,” said Rebecca Boyles, director and senior scientist in the Research Computing Division at RTI International. 

NIH has previously funded data-centered efforts to support opioid crisis research. In 2019, the organization awarded $5.8 million to the University of Pittsburgh Division of Internal Medicine to promote opioid research in Appalachia, a region significantly affected by the opioid crisis.

“Historical and cultural factors have caused Appalachia to experience the negative consequences of the opioid epidemic at a disproportionally high rate, including overdoses, neonatal abstinence syndrome and death,” said Jane Liebschutz, MD, chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Pitt.

“Oftentimes, research does not include data from rural populations, meaning that the findings don’t always apply in the same way they would to an urban population. This grant will help to ensure that we are addressing the opioid epidemic in a way that truly helps those who are most impacted.”