As the largest single investment ever made in pain and addiction research, NIH’s HEAL Initiative will be a major leap forward for our understanding of the opioid crisis and the very real problem of pain in America.
As Prepared for Delivery
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this call.
This morning, it’s an honor to be announcing nearly $1 billion in grants as part of NIH’s HEAL Initiative, which is by far the largest and most ambitious research effort on pain and addiction ever launched.
I want to put this announcement in context not only of our opioid strategy, but of President Trump’s vision for healthcare and our efforts at HHS around impactable public health challenges.
President Trump’s vision for healthcare is comprehensive. We are working on three cross-cutting platforms for improving Americans’ health: reforming how Americans finance their healthcare, delivering better value from that care, and addressing particular, impactable health challenges.
One of those impactable challenges is the opioid crisis, where, thankfully, the President’s leadership and the united efforts of communities across America are already producing results. Provisional estimates of overdose deaths dropped by 5 percent from 2017 to 2018, the first decrease in more than 20 years.
We’re making an impact because we’re making use of the effective tools we have. During my very first speech on the opioid crisis as HHS Secretary, I made it very clear that our efforts would follow the science. We would expand access to the gold standard for treatment of opioid use disorder, medication-assisted treatment; we would expand access to the life-saving drug naloxone; and we would reduce inappropriate opioid prescribing.
President Trump promised these same steps when he launched his opioid initiative, and we’ve delivered on them: From 2016 to 2019, we estimate that the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment has increased by 38 percent. The amount of naloxone prescribed monthly has increased 378 percent since the President took office, while the total amount of prescription opioids being prescribed monthly has dropped by 31 percent.
So we’re making an impact with the tools we have. But NIH, as part of our department-wide strategy for the crisis, has also identified a number of crucial needs or significant opportunities for new tools, improved tools, or better use of the tools we have.
Dr. Collins will explain a bit more about what each of those areas looks like. They encompass every aspect of this crisis: methods and tools for addiction treatment, treatment for neonatal abstinence syndrome, better understanding of chronic pain and better tools for treating it, and more.
As the largest single investment ever made in pain and addiction research, NIH’s HEAL Initiative will be a major leap forward for our understanding of the opioid crisis and the very real problem of pain in America.
NIH research has already undergirded our work in so many ways. One of the best data points we have on the effectiveness of medication-assisted treatment came out of an NIH-funded study, which found that treatment of opioid use disorder with methadone or buprenorphine following an overdose is associated with significant reductions in opioid-related mortality—59 percent for methadone and 38 percent for buprenorphine.
And NIH isn’t the only game in town on supporting and promoting research: CDC released grants this month to support better data at the state level; SAMHSA has worked to make scientifically based resources more available to practitioners; and CMS’s support for state innovation in Medicaid will expand our knowledge of how to support addiction treatment through our financing programs.
Better research is one of the five pillars of the HHS opioid strategy put together by our department under President Trump. But it really undergirds all of the other pillars, too: Better research will support better prevention, treatment, and recovery services; it will support better access to overdose-reversing drugs; it will support better pain management; and it will support better data on the crisis.
So, we look forward to how the sweeping set of grants announced by NIH today will advance our work against opioid addiction and pain on all fronts.
With this research, we will not only develop knowledge to combat this crisis, but also to lay a foundation such that our country will never again see another addiction crisis like this one.
With that, I now want to hand things over to Dr. Collins to talk more about NIH’s research agenda.
