NIH HEAL Initiative

The Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative®, is an NIH-wide effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis. The initiative funds over 1,000 projects nationwide. Researchers are taking a variety of approaches to address the opioid epidemic through understanding, managing, and treating pain, as well as improving prevention and treatment for opioid misuse and addiction (NIH HEAL Initiative, May 2024).

As part of the NIH HEAL Initiative®, the HEAL Data Ecosystem was created to accelerate sharing HEAL-generated data and results with the broad community of researchers, health care providers, community leaders, policy makers, and other HEAL stakeholders. The HEAL Data Ecosystem achieves this by empowering researchers to make their HEAL-generated data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) through HEAL compliant repositories, which are then surfaced centrally by the HEAL Data Platform, enabling HEAL data to be searched, analyzed, and used to make new discoveries (HEAL Data Ecosystem, May 2024).

Pennsieve and SPARC are both HEAL-compliant repositories (Pennsieve also supports SPARC's repository - learn more about our partnership here). SPARC is the designated repository for the the NIH HEAL RE-JOIN Program and the NIH HEAL PRECISION Human Pain Network. Additionally, Pennsieve and SPARC are available to accept data from any HEAL studies outside of these networks.

Interested in learning more? Contact us at [[email protected]]