NIDA Awards Funding to Study Incentivizing Contingency Management Adoption

DynamiCare Health, a digital health company specializing in substance use disorders, announced this month that it has been awarded a Fast-Track Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the US National Institutes of Health, to fund a study that will test incentivizing addiction treatment providers to adopt contingency management programs.

DynamiCare, which will receive up to $2 million over 3 years if project milestones are met, has developed a digital therapeutic that automates contingency management. In a news release announcing the grant, DynamiCare noted that more than 100 randomized controlled trials have demonstrated contingency management—the practice of providing small, frequent rewards to patients who stay sober and engaged in treatment—to be an effective, although underutilized intervention. One barrier to widespread adoption has been the lack of a billing pathway for providers to be reimbursed.

In the study to be funded by the NIDA grant, addiction treatment specialists will receive financial incentives for integrating DynamiCare’s contingency management program into their practice, and buprenorphine prescribers will be incentivized to review patients’ behavioral performance data. DynamiCare said in its release that if its collaborative care study is successful, it could lead to the creation of new billing codes and widespread integration of contingency management into care programs.

“After 50 years of research, it’s about time that addiction treatment catches up with modern medicine and adopts objective behavioral health ‘vital signs’ to guide treatment planning,” said David R. Gastfriend MD, DFASAM, chief medical officer of DynamiCare Health and co-principal investigator on the study, said in a news release. “A simple referral and quick data review at each visit is all it takes. Now that technology makes treatment-by-data easy, we hope physicians and other buprenorphine prescribers will join us in studying how best to achieve practice change.”

Western Michigan University and RTI International will partner with DynamiCare Health to conduct the research.