Center awarded over $1.18 million to support community health initiatives

The Center for Behavioral Emergency and Addiction Research (CBEAR) at UTHealth Houston, housed within McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, was recently awarded two grants worth over $1.18 million. These funds will help the CBEAR team continue to build data-driven community collaborations to attack large-scale health problems, like mental health, fentanyl, and drug use disorders.

“These awards allow us to expand services across the state and build upon our widely successful Houston Emergency Opioid Engagement System (Heroes) model,” noted Robert H. Graham Professor in Entrepreneurial Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering and CBEAR Executive Director James Langabeer II, PhD, EdD. “We aim to improve behavioral health through prevention, policy, and treatment programs, primarily for populations with limited access to care.”

The two awards include $945,000 from the Texas Opioid Abatement Fund Council (Texas Comptroller’s Office). The Short-Term Community-based Opioid Recovery Effort (CORE) grant funds will help several Texas regions add additional research personnel to support substance use disorders. The next award, worth $236,000, is for the HEROES clinical care program and will focus on supporting the cost of advanced practice nurses and counselors. These funds will help strengthen the existing funding we already receive from the Texas Health and Human Services for this fiscal year. Funds will support CBEAR’s efforts in 10 cities across Texas, for HEROES projects, the First Responder Initiative, and the Integrated Community Opioid Network (ICON).

According to the CBEAR team, drug-related deaths are the third leading cause of “unintentional injury” mortality, right behind heart disease and cancer. The Harris County Public Health’s data indicates that over 5,400 people in the county and over 23,700 people across the state died from substance-involved matters between 2020 and 2024.

“All of these deaths are preventable, and once a patient is ready, recovery is possible,” says Langabeer. “We work with local fire departments, emergency medical services, judicial systems, and recovery centers to build community collaborations that exchange data to collectively identify individuals at high-risk for an overdose, and get them into treatment, free of charge.”

Tiffany Champagne-Langabeer, PhD, RDN, associate professor and CBEAR deputy director, is the PI for the CORE grant. These projects will help expand infrastructure for opioid use disorder across four medically underserved regions in Texas; Harris County (Cypress Fairbanks), Galveston and Liberty Counties, Victoria County, Bastrop County, and Hays County. The goal is to expand emergency medical services and treatment resources for substance use.

“The CORE grant helps CBEAR continue to build comprehensive, collaborative, data-driven, cross-sector collaborations in cities all across Texas to help save the lives of all Texans experiencing issues related to substance use and mental health,” stated Champagne-Langabeer.

Assistant Professor and Director of Operations at CBEAR, Andrea Yatsco, PhD, is leading the Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD OBOT) program. Funded by the BeWell Institute at UTHealth San Antonio, this project will provide comprehensive screening and treatment for up to 18 patients in Houston who are diagnosed with opioid use disorder.

“This program will benefit patients we identify as the most vulnerable individuals with opioid use disorder. They lack health insurance and financial resources,” Yatsco stated. “Our program will cover the cost of their treatment, including prescription costs. We will also provide free medical visits, counseling, peer support, and group treatments.”

Langabeer stated that, “we have been continuously funded since 2017 for our work in opioids and mental health, and through CBEAR, we continue to expand targeted education and mental health support to individuals, community agencies, as well as Texas First Responders (police, fire, and EMS) through various projects and initiatives currently in place. We have a special interest in keeping our first responders healthy. Our staff understands the challenges faced by first responders in Texas. Medical and police emergencies of all sorts create post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and have been shown to lead to higher rates of substance use and suicides compared to the general population.”

For more information on the many services offered by CBEAR, please visit https://sbmi.uth.edu/cbear/.