Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)'s Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) cross-site evaluation design and implementation challenges

The cross-site infrastructure for the SBIRT program supports three interrelated evaluation efforts: a process evaluation, an impact or outcome evaluation, and an economic evaluation. The process evaluation serves the critical role of establishing the overall evaluation's context and consequently aids in the interpretation of its findings; it also describes the content of grantees' interventions and their underlying logic models. The outcome evaluation provides information on what impact the SBIRT interventions have on the patients, health care practitioners, and grantees and intermediary organizations involved. The outcome evaluation also provides evidence on how specific practitioner and programmatic characteristics relate to effectiveness. The economic evaluation provides information on the cost, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of the interventions. This presentation will highlight the creation of the evaluation design and the challenges faced in implementing it.