Executive Summary
The systems to prevent and mitigate Appalachia’s escalating opioid addiction are broken. Treatment clinics are needed urgently. Yet, prevention funding is often based on federal and state priorities, not local or regional needs. The epidemic persisted for years before government agencies prioritized money for opioid-focused prevention in Appalachia. We need sustainable, scalable revenue to support effective and timely prevention services.
Using social franchising as a route to simultaneously scale and impact treatment and prevention, RESTORE will establish a network of 35 branded, revenue-generating, non-profit, office-based outpatient treatment clinics. These clinics will provide revenue for rapid reinvestment into local prevention agencies. RESTORE will serve up to 2.7 million people in Appalachia’s highest-need, historically underserved areas.
Charity, fund, non-governmental organization, religious institution, school, or other entity
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Accomplishments
The ASC was awarded two large research grants in 2020, both of which were submitted with key RESTORE collaborators. The first is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to establish infrastructure for the study of recovery from opioid use disorder within the Opioids Research Consortium of Central Appalachia (the ORCCA; also an ETSU-VT collaboration). This is directly relevant to RESTORE.
One key deliverable is enrolling rural addiction medicine clinics and providers into a network for comparative effectiveness trials and rapid dissemination of evidence-based practices. The second grant was to establish the ETSU/NORC Rural Health Equity Research Center, one of seven Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)-funded Rural Health Research Centers in the nation. Awarded to the ASC partnership with the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, the ETSU/NORC RHERC is focused on the substance use disorder epidemic in the U.S. through the lens of rural health equity.
