The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene an ad hoc committee to develop a blueprint, including specific, actionable steps for building and sustaining an infrastructure for delivering prevention interventions targeting risk factors for behavioral health disorders. In conducting its work, the committee will:
1. Identify best practices for creating a sustainable behavioral health prevention infrastructure. Review the landscape of behavioral health prevention at different levels (e.g., national and state, including evidence-based prevention services); where different levels of these prevention services (e.g., universal, selected, and indicated services) could be delivered (e.g., within the community, health care settings, justice systems, schools, human services settings); the workforce needed (investment and their training); and the data systems necessary to track prevention needs, outcomes, and program delivery. Informed by this review, the committee will identify the optimal characteristics and components of a sustainable behavioral health prevention infrastructure. For this infrastructure, the committee should consider embedding prevention services within existing systems and settings, establishing an independent prevention delivery system to which existing systems and settings can refer individuals and families for the receipt of prevention services, and/or other possible approaches by which behavioral health prevention programs can be delivered and sustained.
2. Identify funding needs and strategies. Review current funding sources for prevention, identify ways those funding sources could be better deployed (including ways to facilitate the integration of funding streams at the state level to be more impactful), and identify new or emerging funding sources that could be redirected and deployed in a coordinated effort to support the prevention infrastructure (e.g., use of opioid settlement funds).
3. Identify specific research gaps germane to the widespread adoption of evidence-based behavioral health prevention interventions. Identify key policy and implementation knowledge gaps and the resulting research opportunities that could provide the information needed to support the adoption and sustainment of a national prevention infrastructure for behavioral health. Research gaps are expected to be identified in the realms of policy research and health services research (e.g., dissemination and implementation, economic analyses).
4. Make actionable recommendations. Recommend how federal and state policies could be expanded or implemented to develop and sustain the prevention infrastructure system, including those that improve financing for evidence-based prevention and support workforce development, data interoperability, and evidence-based policymaking. Recommendations for research necessary to fill the prevention services research gaps should also be identified.