Addressing the Opioid Epidemic with Better Data: An Overview of HHS Priorities and Projects to Expand Data Capacity for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research on Opioids

This report builds on a workshop sponsored by ASPE, titled Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: Harnessing the Power of Data for Patient-Centered Research in December 2018, which showcased projects working to build the data infrastructure for patient-centered outcomes research around opioids. Specifically, this paper: reviews HHS’s strategy to “strengthen public health data reporting and collection to improve the timeliness and specificity of data”1 to combat the opioid epidemic, and highlights agency-specific opioid strategies that necessitate “better data” to be fully achieved; 2) documents HHS-funded projects to build the data infrastructure around opioids and maps them to HHS priorities around “better data” on opioids; and 3) discusses the data infrastructure challenges and opportunities to enable access to “better data” for research around opioids.