News & Updates — FORE Announcements

FORE today announced five new grants totaling more than $2 million to support collaborative strategies for addressing the nation’s opioid and overdose crisis. The new awards expand overdose prevention and treatment efforts for youth, families, and communities; promote patient-centered care across hospitals and emergency systems; and strengthen public health infrastructure to respond to emerging drug threats.

“These grants reflect FORE’s commitment to supporting innovative, evidence-based solutions across generations and settings,” said Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, President of FORE. “From protecting adolescents in schools and supporting pregnant patients to enhancing emergency care and improving access to timely data, these projects share a goal of saving lives, reducing stigma, and building sustainable systems for recovery.”

The New York University Grossman School of Medicine will receive a $369,285 grant to replicate and scale its Prevention Education Partnership (PEP) — a school-based opioid education and overdose prevention program originally launched in New York City. Partnering with Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where unintentional drug overdose is the second leading cause of adolescent death, the project will bring overdose response training to students and teachers in Columbus City Schools. The project will also develop a digital toolkit for schools and clinicians to replicate the program in additional cities.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) will receive a $597,000 grant to develop new classification systems for linking common drug names to analytical chemical names. These systems will enable drug checking programs in different parts of the U.S. to harmonize the data they collect. UNC will also launch a training program to establish new confirmatory drug checking sites and will support community-based drug checking programs that use different methods of drug checking. Through standardized data, training, and proficiency testing, the project aims to build national capacity for monitoring and responding to changes in the drug supply, forming the foundation of a near real-time national drug threat detection system.

With a $595,878 grant, researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will map the national adoption of buprenorphine treatment in emergency departments (EDs) and emergency medical services (EMS), as well as identify the policy and system-level factors that would increase the uptake of these evidence-based practices. The resulting toolkit and policy recommendations will be targeted to accrediting bodies, payers, state health departments, and hospital associations. The researchers will also document whether and how Medicaid programs across the U.S. pay for EMS-initiated buprenorphine.

The Essential Hospitals Institute (EHI) will receive a $293,495 grant to launch a 12-month learning collaborative for safety net hospitals to develop and scale multi-generational approaches to opioid use disorder (OUD) prevention, treatment, and recovery. The project will convene hospitals serving high-risk populations to share best practices in integrated care for patients and families affected by OUD, with particular emphasis on perinatal and intergenerational supports.

A $199,980 grant to Pregnancy Justice, in partnership with Doing Right by Birth, will establish a Perinatal Substance Use Disorder Legal-Scientific Resource Hub. This national resource will provide attorneys, judges, policymakers, and journalists with access to peer-reviewed medical and public health evidence on opioid and substance use during pregnancy. The hub will strengthen legal supports, counter misinformation, and foster collaboration between the legal and medical professions to promote evidence-based approaches to perinatal substance use disorder care.