To change policy and practice, and ultimately improve substance use disorder (SUD) treatment system performance, the Center must engage with key stakeholders in a bidirectional manner, focusing on the issues of greatest importance to them and producing timely information and analysis on those issues that can feed directly into the policy process and drive the improvement of system performance in the future. Thus, for the renewal of the Center to Improve System Performance of Substance Use Disorder Treatment we are adding a new Policy/Dissemination Core. This Core relies, in part, on the communications activities that the Administrative Core has conducted in the current Center and will continue in the renewal. We distinguish communications as the activities to highlight the information itself (e.g., infographics, social media posts) versus the knowledge and dissemination activities of this Core (e.g., co-creation and targeted sharing of information intended to directly inform policy and practice). The Policy/Dissemination Core will also supplement the traditional academic dissemination of the Research Core. The aims of the Policy/Dissemination Core are to: 1) strengthen and expand relationships with key stakeholders, including insurers, state Medicaid program staff, directors of state SUD services, leaders of provider organizations, federal policy staff, and organizations representing persons with lived experience of SUD; 2) use a bidirectional engagement process with these key stakeholders to select topics for research, produce important and timely new knowledge, and inform the interpretation of our findings; and 3) conduct Center-wide knowledge translation and dissemination activities to ensure timely and accessible access to Center research on topics of greatest importance for policy and practice. Timely topics will be informed by stakeholders’ conceptions of short-term pressing issues and those anticipated for the longer-term. We will provide key information needed to address those challenges and offer our understanding on emerging issues. We will produce targeted, quick turnaround policy analyses that assess and synthesize evidence to provide critical, short-term insights on policy concerns. We will also work with stakeholders to consider the science needed on longer-term issues to understand how to tweak current policy or develop policy that requires more fundamental change. This Core will be innovative in its intentional focus to involve policy makers, payers, practitioners, persons with lived experience of SUD, and other stakeholders in all aspects of the research process, from research question identification, to interpretation of findings, and to communication and dissemination to stakeholders to advance policy and practice around systems improvement for SUD. This approach should increase the likelihood of policy and practice impact and of sustainability of innovative practices that require the intertwined delivery and payment systems t...