Legal Science Partners, LLC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase II: NIDA

Description

The United States has relied on state legislation as a primary tool to address the rising health toll of opioid misuseInterventions including prescription drug monitoring systemsthird party naloxone administration laws and Good Samaritanprovisions are a key elements of a comprehensive responseEvaluating these interventions to see what lawsand specific elements of lawsmake a differenceis crucialbut difficultLegal ScienceLLCLSplays a unique role in supporting better tracking and evaluation of lawThe company is founded on the principles of Policy Surveillancethe systematicscientific tracking of laws of public health significanceIn March ofLS launched the MonQclea SaaS software platform that allowsbuilding empirical policy data with scientific codebooks and protocolsstoring of these data in a redundantscalable databaseandpublishing via an integrated CMS with mapstables and data visualization toolsFor Phase IIwe propose to significantly expand the MonQcle to include a Health Outcome Policy EvaluationHOPElaboratoryThe MonQcle powers the Prescription Drug Abuse Policy SystemPDAPSand the Drug Abuse Policy SystemDAPSlaunching earlyWe propose a new policy analysis paradigm to streamline and accelerate the assessment of policy impactWe will use human centered design principles to design the dashboardUsing the application programming interfaceAPIwe will include the storage and retrieval of drug related outcome dataincluding importexportcomputational and visual design and display featuresWe will integrate a suite of publically available longitudinal outcomes data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and CDC s WONDER with the existing drug policy data including pdmp snaloxoneGood Samaritanmethadone assisted treatmentdrugged driving and medical and recreational marijuana lawsIn partnership with researchers from Battelle Memorial Institute sBattelleLS will extend the Phase I Daps to include a generic HOPE architecture and subsequently deploy a unique substance use specific policy lab called DOPEDrug Outcome Policy EvaluationDOPE will be a researcher friendlyextension of Daps that facilitates overlay of health outcome data on state policy dataas well as integrated computational functionality in R to rank policies or policy features across states and measure their effects on population healthCollaborators from Battelle s Advanced Analytics and Health ResearchAAHRteam will assess the impact of key state legal interventions on reducing the opiate epidemicUsing DOPEthe team will examine a set of research questions including but not limited toWhen policies for Naloxone accessGood Samaritan protectionsPDMPmedication assisted treatment with methadone and or drugged driving are in placedoes it decrease the rate of drug related deathsall drugsDo policies related to legalizing marijuanafor recreation or medical purposesshow a change in marijuana use and risk perception Finallywhat suite of policies yields the greatest reduction in the rate of drug related deathsLastlytogether the teams will address a suite of research questions about the functionalityefficiencyfeasibility of DOPE The proposed Drug Outcome Policy Evaluation laboratoryDOPEwill allow analysts and legislators to assess the legal landscape and estimate which laws and features of those laws are most instrumental in helping to reduce and reverse the effects of drug misuse and abuse on the health of millions of Americans