Bruce Schackman

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) will collaborate with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to initiate the HEALing Communities Study as part of the National Institute of Health HEAL initiative. The HEALing Communities study is a multi-site national research effort that aims to develop and implement evidence-based interventions to prevent and treat […]

Hospital-based consultation services that link inpatients with opioid use disorders to treatment offer a unique opportunity to narrow the treatment gap that results in only a minority of individuals with opioid use disorders receiving evidence-based treatment.  Dr. Jennifer McNeely recently received R01 funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to study the Consult for […]

Between 1999 and 2015, the annual sales of opioid analgesics in the US quadrupled to about $8 billion dollars. In an effort to address over-prescribing of opioid analgesics, Dr. Marcus Bachhuber recently received a career development award (K-award) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to implement a default opioid prescribing system in the electronic health […]

On March 19, researchers from institutions across the country joined CHERISH leaders Bruce Schackman, Kathryn McCollister, Benjamin Linas and Sean Murphy for a daylong CHERISH introductory training to economic evaluations. Dr. Schackman began the day by introducing CHERISH to the attendees, who represented more than 25 institutions across New England, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the South […]

Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) is one of the leading causes of infectious disease deaths in the United States. Injection drug use is a common route of HCV transmission and the annual number of reported cases continues to rise due to the opioid epidemic. Previous HCV treatment regimens had severe side effects and limited efficacy, but […]

In response to the growing opioid epidemic in the United States, there is an increased focus on expanding evidence-based treatment using medications prescribed for substance use disorder, especially medications that can be prescribed in outpatient settings including buprenorphine and naltrexone. The Surgeon General’s report on facing addiction in America describes substance use disorders as chronic illnesses requiring […]

In the opening plenary panel of the CHERISH (Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV and HIV) conference on evidence-based policy and practice are (l to r) Daniel Polsky, PhD, moderator and Executive Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI); Tom McLellan, PhD, Chairman of the Board and […]

Public health officials, elected leaders and medical professionals across New York State gathered in Albany, New York on February 7, 2017 to discuss hepatitis C in the state for the first ever New York State hepatitis C virus (HCV) summit. In a consensus statement, the committee that organized the summit called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to […]

Medicare rang in the new year with four new codes to reimburse primary care teams for behavioral health services. According to an article that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 2, 2017, three of the codes support services using the Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) and the fourth allows for services provided under other […]

The Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorders, HCV, and HIV (CHERISH) was profiled at the Liver Meeting® 2016 in Boston, MA. The Center’s mission is to develop and disseminate health economic research on healthcare utilization, health outcomes, and health-related behaviors that informs substance use disorder treatment policy and HCV and […]

The US Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine issued a report in 1996 that set the standards for reporting of cost-effectiveness studies in the field, resulting in a rapid expansion of publications and establishment of similar national standards in other jurisdictions. Twenty years later, the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine has […]

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently released an issue brief detailing the most costly outpatient drugs to Medicaid in 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the authors analyzed outpatient drug costs based on Medicaid spending (before rebates) to determine which drugs account […]