Evaluation of the RWJF Advancing Recovery Initiative

Advancing Recovery: State and Provider Partnerships for Quality Addiction Care is an $11 million national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation designed to promote the use of evidence-based practices by treatment providers through innovative partnerships between providers and single state agencies. This initiative is expected to improve clinical and administrative practices that currently impede the use of evidence-based practices.

In the first round of two planned grant cycles, Advancing Recovery awarded grants to six state-provider partnerships to increase the use of evidence-based practices at the provider level over the next 2 years. The use of evidence-based practices will be facilitated by implementing innovative administrative strategies at both the state and provider levels. Selected grantees will implement evidence-based practices from at least two of the five targeted categories selected by Advancing Recovery:

1. The use of medications for specific diagnoses
2. Screening and brief intervention in primary care settings
3. The use of specific psychosocial clinical interventions
4. The use of post-treatment aftercare
5. Provision of case management, wrap-around, and supportive services

The University of Georgia, in partnership with the Oregon Health Sciences University, has been awarded a multi-year grant to conduct a process and impact evaluation of the Advancing Recovery initiative. These activities will involve repeated data collections from participating treatment providers and single state agencies, as well as Advancing Recovery program staff, to identify collaborative processes undertaken to reduce barriers to adoption of evidence-based practices, and to measure pre-post levels of practice adoption in the primary domains listed above.

Principal Investigators: Paul Roman (UGA), Dennis McCarty (OHSU)
Funding Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Funding period: October 2006 - September 2010