Beyond Jacobson & Truax: Modern Methods for Estimating Clinically Significant Change

Antonio Morgan-Lopez, PhD | January 16, 2024: In the majority of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) the focus is on differences in the average change over time on outcomes across intervention conditions, with variation in individual trajectories often treated as nuisance. In contrast, a primary focus on inferences regarding the improvement (or worsening) of individual participants…

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Adapting to the Fentanyl Epidemic: Implications for Translation of a Multi-Component Intervention and RCT in the Emergency Department and Real World Lessons from an Implementation Practitioner

Lauren K. Whiteside, MD, MS | November 14, 2023: The opioid epidemic is rapidly evolving with the proliferation of nonpharmaceutical fentanyl. Simultaneously, researchers, public health officials, and clinicians are working to develop and implement interventions to improve clinical care for patients with opioid use disorder (OUD). The Emergency Department Longitudinal Integrated Care (ED-LINC) randomized clinical…

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Understanding and Reducing Inequities in Substance Use Treatment

Lesia Ruglass, PhD | October 31, 2023: Data from the United States National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH, 2021) indicate that while certain racial/ethnic minoritized populations may have equivalent or lower rates of substance use disorders (SUD) compared to White people, evidence suggests that once developed, and given structural inequities and barriers, racial/ethnic…

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Design Considerations in Embedded Pragmatic Trials: Separating Rigor from Idolatry

Gregory Simon, MD, MPH | September 12, 2023: This presentation will consider specific considerations in the design and implementation of embedded pragmatic trials, including: eligibility criteria, unit of allocation, method of allocation, standardization of “active” interventions, standardization of “control” interventions, blinding, and analytic strategy. For each of these design decisions, investigators must focus on the…

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Innovating Substance Use Disorder Treatment at Scale

Jeffrey De Flavio, MD | September 26, 2023: Across medicine clinical innovations take years to disseminate widely into practice, while some best practices in addiction medicine fail to ever gain widespread adoption. This presentation describes two private medical practices (Groups Recover Together and Affect Therapeutics) which have brought underutilized and evidence-based interventions to scale across…

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Proposing and Applying the Observational-Implementation Hybrid Approach

Justin Knox, PhD, MPH | October 10, 2023: We recently proposed the observational-implementation hybrid approach, or the incorporation of implementation science elements into observational studies in order to collect information that will allow for anticipation, estimation, and/or inference about the effects of interventions and implementation strategies. We describe this approach, including examples of how we…

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