Dr. Alina Cernasev, PhD, PharmD, MSc, Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Translational Science on the Nashville campus, recently received word that she and Dr. Ken Hohmeier, along with her collaborator Dr. Jerry Cochran, PhD, MSW, Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, were awarded R34 grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The R34 funding was awarded for the Co-Use of Opioid Medications and Alcohol Prevention Study (COAPS), which will adapt, manualize, and test the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of an Alcohol-targeted Brief Intervention-Medication Therapy Management (ABI-MTM) intervention with community pharmacy patients. ABI-MTM will be a pharmacy-based medication management intervention, combined with Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral (SBIR) to treatment that will target the following: alcohol use elimination during opioid treatment or non-opioid pain management substitution in consultation with the prescriber. Results from this study will provide critical insights, foundational data, and strategies for executing a powered trial and possible future system/practice-level implementation.
The grant is funded for three years (2022-2025) through the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Dr. Cernasev will act as the site PI and Dr. Hohmeier will serve as Co-Investigator, while Dr. Cochran, the director of the Program for Addiction Research, Clinical Care, Knowledge, and Advocacy (PARCKA), will oversee the study in his role as overall PI. Dr. Cochran’s team at Utah will lend their expertise in the areas of addiction-related clinical care to the study, while Drs. Cernasev and Hohmeier from UTHSC will contribute their expertise on addiction treatment in pharmacy and implementation of treatment models into community pharmacy settings.
