Enhancing the Reach and Impact of Drug Abuse and Behavioral Health Preventive Interventions: Mining Existing Data for Bold New Discoveries

This roundtable will challenge participants to discuss the enormous potential of existing data sets to address pressing research questions related to drug abuse and behavioral health prevention research. As federal and non-federal entities support investigators to conduct groundbreaking epidemiological, etiological, and prevention research, opportunities are plentiful to augment datasets, harmonize datasets, and reuse datasets to answer important new questions. This session will challenge discussants and participants to identify research questions that could be answered through the innovative use of existing data. This session will also showcase examples of such work and offer solutions to challenges faced in conducting new studies that involve existing data.

The first discussant will represent the National Institute on Drug Abuse and will provide insight into the use of existing data for research, including secondary data analysis priorities for the Institute, the use of data repositories and public use data sets, and data sharing expectations for NIH grantees. The second presenter will discuss potential research questions, analytical techniques, and considerations for the use of longitudinal epidemiological cohort data, sequential epidemiological data, and longitudinal prevention cohort data.

Using a recent NIDA-funded study as a demonstration case, the third discussant will describe the potential for leveraging administrative and electronic health records data from large health systems to inform prevention interventions. The fourth presenter will discuss opportunities to better identify moderators and/or mechanisms of prevention intervention effects using existing data and will describe the need for flexible approaches to analysis of data across multiple samples.

The final presenter will discuss lessons learned from conducting projects that integrate behavioral data with biological, social network, developmental, intergenerational, and geographic/GIS data using examples from a major longitudinal prevention study. The brief presentations will be followed by a robust discussion of how drug abuse and behavioral health research can be advanced using existing data sources; challenges faced in working with existing data, complex data, and older data; and the role of innovative analytic strategies in advancing prevention science.