HSN Leadership
Health System Node Principal Investigator
Kaiser Permanente Division of Research
Dr. Cynthia Campbell is a Senior Research Scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, where she is Co-Director of the Center on Addiction and Mental Health Research and conducts research on the treatment of substance use disorder (SUD) and mental health problems. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco and at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Her interests include access to SUD treatment, SUD among patients with pain, prescription opioid use and misuse, and organizational factors and policy related to these areas. She has led NIH and PCORI funded studies on the impact of the ACA legislation on addiction and HIV services, on substance use service intensity for buprenorphine patients, and a trial of a patient activation intervention in primary care for chronic pain patients using prescription opioids. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the
CTN-0084, a prescription opioid registry developed across 10 health system, and MPI of CTN-0084-A-2, a feasibility study examining how to use digital health tools to continuously collect data on patients with opioid use disorder being treated with buprenorphine. She is a co-investigator on CTN-0074, the PROUD Trial, and
CTN-0077, a study of how patients document medical cannabis use in their health record. Her work also includes the study of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and young adults. She received her doctorate in Public Health at the University of Michigan, and conducted her postdoctoral work at UCSF in a NIDA-funded fellowship on Substance Abuse and Health Services. Dr. Campbell was recently funded to lead
CTN-0117, which will use EHR data to examine the major shift to virtual treatment for drug use disorders during the pandemic in a large, diverse health care system, specifically exploring potential disparities in accessing treatment.
Other Significant Contributor, formerly Health System Node Principal Investigator
Kaiser Permanente Division of Research
Constance Weisner, DrPH, MSW, is a Senior Scientist at the Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California and an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, She has a doctorate in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley and a Masters in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Weisner is a member of the International Expert Advisory Group on Alcohol and Drug Dependence of the World Health Organization, and a former member of the NIAAA, NIDA and SAMHSA/CSAT National Advisory Councils and the MacArthur Network on Mental Health and the Law. She has received MERIT Awards from both NIDA and NIAAA. She has participated on several Institute of Medicine committees, including the Crossing the Quality Chasm series Improving the Quality of Health Care for Mental and Substance-Use Conditions, Broadening the Base of Alcohol Problems, and Prevention, Diagnosis, Treatment and Management of Substance Use Disorders in the U.S. Armed Forces. She was a section editor of the recent Surgeon General Report, Facing Addition in America: Alcohol, Drugs and Health. She is one of the Principal Investigators of the Health Systems Node of NIDA Clinical Trials Network. She conducts intervention and observational research, often involving EHR-based data. Her on-going work focuses on integrating alcohol, drug, and mental health services with health care.
Health System Node Principal Investigator
Kaiser Permanente Health Research Institute
Dr. Katharine Bradley is a general internist and Senior Investigator at
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. She conducts health services research and pragmatic and implementation trials focused on improving the quality of care for patients with unhealthy alcohol and substance use in general medical settings. She previously conducted extensive research validating and implementing AUDIT-C alcohol screening questionnaire in the VA. Recently she led the NIAAA-funded CHOICE trial that tested the effectiveness of collaborative care for alcohol use disorders in the VA (completed in 2017) and the SPARC trial, a pragmatic stepped-wedge trial to implement evidence-based care for unhealthy alcohol use in Kaiser Permanente Washington (KPWA). Dr. Bradley currently leads the PROUD trial (CTN-0074), which is which is a pragmatic trial testing a collaborative care model for treating opioid use disorders (OUDs) in primary care across 6 diverse health systems. She is also Multiple PI on two other pragmatic trials: an NIMH-funded HEAL project that includes a pragmatic trial of patient-centered, collaborative care for primary care patients with OUD and depression in KPWA and Indiana University Health System (MI-CARE trial; MPI with Dr. Debar), and an AHRQ-funded implementation trial of evidence-based alcohol-related care across 125 primary care clinics in Michigan (MI-SPARC trial; MPI with Anya Day at Altarum in Michigan), based on lesson from the SPARC trial. Recent health services research studies included
CTN-0065, which evaluated a pilot study implementing cannabis and other drug screening in 3 primary care sites (completed 2018), and
CTN-0077 (MPI with Dr. Lapham) that is studying how patients use cannabis to manage symptoms and how that is documented in their electronic health records (EHRs). Dr. Bradley was recently funded to lead
CTN-0113 with Dr. Williams, which will use EHR data to evaluate the psychometric performance of a DSM-5 substance use symptom checklist in the context of routine primary care.
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Core Faculty
Dr. Brian Ahmedani is the Director of the
Center for Health Policy and Health Services Research at Henry Ford Health System. Dr. Ahmedani received his PhD and MSW degrees from Michigan State University and licensed clinical social worker. His research interests are in the area of health services and interventions for individuals with mental health and substance use conditions, with particular expertise in suicide prevention. He is PI/Co-PI for two large multi-site studies on suicide prevention – the first investigating healthcare use patterns before suicide and the second evaluating implementation of the Zero Suicide Model across health systems. He is also Co-PI for the Trans-America Consortium of the NIH All of Us Research Program, and serves as Co-I on several other projects. Dr. Ahmedani has been appointed to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Suicide Prevention Commission for a term commencing April 3, 2020 and expiring April 2, 2024. The Commission will work with state departments and agencies and nonprofit organizations to research the causes and possible underlying factors of suicide in Michigan.
Dr. Ingrid Binswanger is a Senior Investigator at the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado (KPCO). She completed her medical training at the University of California, San Francisco and received her Master of Public Health degree from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research focuses on developing innovative and patient-centered ways to prevent harms from use of pharmaceutical opioids and other substances. She also conducts research to reduce morbidity and mortality in people who are involved in the criminal legal system. Her team is also studying COVID-19 viral and antibody testing. Dr. Binswanger is a practicing physician in Chemical Dependency Treatment Services with the Colorado Permanente Medical Group at KPCO. She is also an Associate Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. She is a Senior Editor of the journal Addiction and an Associate Editor of the journal Substance Abuse.
Dr. Stacy Sterling is a Co-Director of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health Research and a Research Scientist at the
Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. She received her doctoral training at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, and her Master's degrees in Public Health and Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include developing systems for implementing evidence-based, integrated, behavioral health services into primary care; adolescent behavioral health prevention and early intervention; alcohol and drug and mental health treatment outcomes and access; and behavioral health dissemination and implementation research. Dr. Sterling has extensive experience conducting pragmatic clinical effectiveness trials and dissemination and implementation studies in health care settings including those that focus on telemedicine; universal anticipatory guidance for parents to prevent the initiation of depression, anxiety, substance use initiation and delinquent behavior; and screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (SBIRT) for both adolescent and adult depression and alcohol and drug use.
Dr. Williams is an addictions health services and disparities researcher and an implementation scientist. She holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Health Services and Director of the Doctoral Program in
Health Services at the University of Washington and a core investigator and co-director of the post-doctoral fellowship at the Denver-Seattle Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered Value-Driven Care at VA Puget Sound Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D). She has longstanding interests in health behavior and the mechanisms (both societal- and healthcare-level) that help drive behavior change, particularly as these relate to vulnerable populations and stigmatized conditions. Her research is specifically focused on increasing access to evidence-based treatments for unhealthy alcohol and other substance use in diverse medical settings, including understanding and promoting equity in this care for vulnerable patient subpopulations (e.g., those with HIV and HCV, racial/ethnic minorities, persons living in rural areas, transgender patients, and women). She currently leads research focused on understanding patterns of alcohol use and care across transgender status, tailoring and testing practice facilitation to implement evidence-based alcohol-related care in hepatology clinics, and increasing access to evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorders in primary care
Steering Committee
The Steering Committee is made up of all of the HSN health system site leaders, and meets quarterly via teleconference, and annually in person to disseminate current SU/SUD information, generate research ideas, discuss progress on active studies, and hear and discuss NIDA CTN updates from the HSN Principal Investigators.
Stakeholder Advisory Committee
A diverse panel of stakeholders from our health systems nation-wide helps guide selection and refinement of research questions, including front-line clinician and staff, and patients with lived experience of substance use disorder. The panel is convened annually, or more often if needed to review and propose research questions.
