News & Milestones
Research, policy analysis, and announcements from the founding team of Essentrify — advancing opioid settlement compliance and community resilience.
The $57 Billion Accountability Gap: So What?
Do opioid settlement RFPs set the money up to learn what works, and to last?
In our continuing investigation, so far we have reviewed 39 RFPs from 29 issuers across 17 states. Most leave key measurement and sustainability choices to applicants — making it harder to demonstrate success, compare results, or build evidence of what works. Fourth in a series on the evidentiary foundations of opioid abatement.
View the one-page summary →For the latest updated full paper, contact us.
Series: Evidentiary Foundations of Opioid Abatement
A sequence of papers examining the evidence standards, measurement challenges, and structural constraints that will determine whether the opioid settlement succeeds or fails.
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Paper IV · Current
The $57 Billion Accountability Gap: So What?
A progress report on our running RFP corpus — 39 RFPs from 29 issuers across 17 states, coded across eight design dimensions. Early results: most RFPs leave key measurement and sustainability choices to applicants, making it harder to demonstrate success, compare results across communities, or build evidence of what worked.
For the latest updated full paper, contact us.
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Paper III
Will the Opioid Settlement Billions Make a Lasting Difference? Who Cares?
The settlement architecture leaves each state to decide who holds the mission and authority to ensure lasting change happens — a gap most states have yet to fill. This paper asks the question that follows from it: who, exactly, is responsible for determining whether any of the money made a difference?
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Paper II
The Evidence Trap: What Opioid Settlement Recipients Need to Know About Evidence-Based Practice Before It’s Too Late
Argues that “fund evidence-based practices” is widely misunderstood in a way that leads recipients back toward the tobacco settlement’s central failure. Distinguishes evidence-based practice from evidence-based treatment, shows that the factors carrying the most weight in recovery are the hardest to prove, and identifies the binding constraint as bandwidth rather than will or ability.
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Paper I
The $57 Billion Wager We Cannot Afford to Lose
The settlement will be judged not by how the money was spent but by whether anyone can prove it mattered. This paper makes the case that without a measurement infrastructure built into abatement from day one, the opioid settlement risks repeating the tobacco settlement’s defining failure — spending the money without evidence that it worked.
Foundations
Earlier research that laid the groundwork for this series.
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Working Paper
The Challenge of Expressing Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) Through a Digital Health Platform
The foundational five-factor research first circulated in 2020 and updated in March 2022, examining how evidence-based practice can be operationalized within digital health infrastructure. This work established the conceptual throughline from early-stage research to the settlement’s present stakes.
Press Release
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New Paper Warns Opioid Settlement Recipients Are Repeating the Tobacco Settlement’s Central Mistake
The programs most likely to reduce overdose deaths are the ones least able to prove they worked. A new paper from the Essentrify founding team argues the $57 billion opioid settlement is being handed the same opportunity to fail as the tobacco settlement.
Press Release