Evidence-Based Recovery

How Dr. Jay Unick and IRIS Want to Change the System 

What if research didn’t just study addiction recovery, but helped shape it? 

That’s the driving force behind the work of Jay Unick, PhD, MSW, professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. Through Implementation Research to Improve Services (IRIS), Unick is helping bring stronger, evidence-based support to people with opioid use disorder (OUD). Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, IRIS builds recovery research infrastructure by fostering community-academic partnerships designed to develop and scale effective recovery practices. 

IRIS works closely with community-based organizations like Baltimore’s People Encouraging People, which conducts street outreach to individuals experiencing homelessness and OUD, helping them access housing and treatment. “What they were finding is that they didn't really have any tools for measuring whether they were being successful or not,” Unick explained. “We partnered with them to identify existing tools, to modify those tools, and then to test out how well those tools were working in practice.” 

A core part of IRIS’ mission is ensuring that lessons learned extend beyond a single organization. Unick stressed the importance of sharing tools and insights widely and of ensuring that public resources are used wisely. “Most recovery services are paid for with tax dollars through Medicaid, block grants, city funds,” he said. “Making sure that our services are effective is just good public stewardship. It’s just good practice.” 

In a new video Q&A, Unick shares how IRIS is helping communities expand what works — and build stronger systems of recovery support. 

Questions

What is the IRIS Project?

IRIS is a National Institute of Drug Abuse-funded project that is building the relationship between us, these academic institutions, and community-based providers of recovery services. These community recovery organizations are groups that are often staffed by individuals that have lived experience, so people in recovery themselves that have gone through the recovery journey.

What’s one thing you’re doing right now to help communities strengthen their support for people in recovery?

One of the things that's really happened the last several years is the development of peer integration into clinical care settings. Peers are people that have lived experience, that have gone through training program, and they can help individuals through their recovery journey,

Peer recovery coaches are really an essential link between individuals starting their recovery journey and the rest of the treatment system, in addition to being a form of treatment themselves. But while we're rolling these peers out into multiple communities, we have not done a good job of doing research with those peers to identify what best practices are to build an evidence-based practice of peer recovery coaching. And that's one of the things that IRIS is really invested in, is working with peers, working with people in recovery, and working with the medical system to help build out an evidence base to ensure that when peers are delivering these services, they're doing so with a set of best practices.

How does your work impact the broader community?

Making sure that our services are effective is just good public stewardship. It's just good practice for how we spend our dollars. We want to spend our dollars on things that work, and we know there are services that work, but we need to identify them, and then they need to be accelerated in the system.