Abstract
Effectively addressing public health crises requires dynamic and nimble interdisciplinary collaborations across the translational spectrum, from bench to clinic to community. The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program hubs are uniquely suited to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations across universities and academic medical centers. This paper describes the activities at the Columbia University CTSA Program hub to address a current public health crisis, the opioid epidemic. Columbia's CTSA Program hub led a three-phase approach, based on the Conceptual Model of Transdisciplinary Scientific Collaboration as described by Stokols et al.: (1) a university-wide planning and brainstorming phase to identify key leaders across many domains who are influential in addressing the opioid epidemic, (2) a campus-wide and community outreach to identify all interested parties, and (3) ongoing targeted support for collaboration development. Preliminary metrics of success are interdisciplinary collaborations and grant funding. We describe recent examples of how interdisciplinary collaboration, academic-community partnership, and pilot funding contributed to the development and funding of innovative interdisciplinary research, including the New York site of the HEALing Communities initiative. The processes are now being used to support interdisciplinary approaches for other translational public health issues.
Highlights
The opioid crisis in the USA shows no signs of abating
While the largest number of Principal Investigators (PIs) is in the Psychiatry department, PIs came from a variety of departments and schools across campus, including Epidemiology, Health Policy and Management, Sociomedical Sciences, Anesthesiology, Orthopedic Surgery, and Social
While investigators at Columbia have an extensive prior track record of innovative substance use research, including opioid research, the activities described in this paper serve as examples of how silos can be bridged to build on existing strengths and facilitate broader interdisciplinary research
Summary
The opioid crisis in the USA shows no signs of abating. Addressing the opioid crisis requires focusing on prevention of inappropriate opioid use, including development of new therapies for pain and treatment of addiction [2]. Inappropriate opioid use can stem from a number of factors, including underlying illnesses or injuries causing pain or addiction to substance use [3]. Interdisciplinary collaboration is required to effectively address this crisis. Effective collaborations might include specialists treating the underlying disease (e.g. oncology), specialists treating injuries (e.g. orthopedics), primary care and emergency physicians treating individuals with chronic pain [4], addiction treatment specialists, community-based mental health specialists [5], criminal justice specialists [6], and informatics linking these systems together.
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