Assessing and Incorporating Intervention Effectiveness in Systems Models of the Opioids Crisis

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are each working to refine systems-level models to understand the complexities of the opioids crisis and the potential impacts of policy intervention options. The modeling efforts undertaken by each of these organizations within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are complementary and function to support the development of decision-making tools that can be used to optimize the public health response to the opioid epidemic. Close collaboration among these modeling teams, as well as with other opioids modeling and data experts, is critical to ensuring the alignment, efficiency, and collective value of the models.

This private workshop was held to support continued interagency collaboration and to facilitate the exchange of information about priority data needs and initial findings from modeling efforts. Discussion at the meeting focused on how policy interventions can be translated into model inputs and next steps to help modeling and intervention research support policy analysis. This meeting built on the discussion held at the April 2019 meeting on the topic of Data Needs in Opioid Systems Modeling. The meeting in October 2020 aimed to bolster the utility of systems models in helping decision-makers understand the outcomes and unintended consequences of potential policy interventions on the opioids system.