The project will develop infrastructure that promotes collaborative interaction among stakeholders who seek, plan, provide, or evaluate substance abuse disorder (SUD) treatment. Because of increasingly serious problems of opioid addiction, the project focuses on patients with opioid use disorders (OUD). The Stakeholders' Substance Use Research and Treatment Information Exchange (SSURTIE) project is designed to foster communication and interaction among a wide array of stakeholder groups who are not traditionally “at the table”—and rarely if ever at the same “table”—in conversations about needs and concerns regarding OUD/SUD treatment.  Key stakeholders can include: patients, family members, physicians, clinicians, researchers and policy makers. Project discussions will ultimately lead to the creation of a research agenda focused on how to make OUD/SUD services responsive to the needs and preferences of patients and families in Los Angeles.  In addition, the lessons learned during this process will be documented in a “how to” manual explaining how to engage the various groups in patient-centered outcomes research.

Project objectives include:

• Building readiness and capacity for individuals and organizations new to research so they are able to engage as partners and consumers of PCOR/CER
• Developing mechanisms to facilitate the interaction of patients with researchers and physicians to promote collaboration in all phases of the research process
• Identifying learning objectives and competencies for PCOR/CER to build into curricula to educate clinicians, researchers, patients, and other stakeholders

The projected outputs from this project are the development of a manual on how to engage researchers, providers, patients, family members, and other key stakeholders in patient-centered research focused on the treatment of opioid use disorders (OUD) and substance use disorders (SUD); and the development of research ideas focused on how to make OUD/SUD services responsive to the needs and preferences of patients and families in Los Angeles.

Project collaborators include patients/consumers; patient advocates from LA Community Health Project; family members of patients; family/patient advocates from Not One More organization; treatment providers; and public policy and addiction researchers.

More on This Project

Project Resource: SSURTIE Stakeholder Meeting Presentation

Project Resource: Stakeholder Methodology Report

This project was originally titled Engaging Patients and Clinicians to Improve Patient-Centered Treatment Outcomes.