Selection and utilization of assessment instruments in substance abuse treatment trials: The National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network experience.

Based on recommendations from a U.S. Institute of Medicine report, the National Institute on Drug Abuse established the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN) in 1999 with the goal of accelerating the translation of science-based addiction treatment research into community-based practice, and improving the quality of addition treatment using science as the vehicle. One of the CTN’s primary tasks is to serve as a platform to forge bidirectional communications and collaborations between providers and scientists to enhance the relevance of research generating empirical results that impact practice. Among the many obstacles in moving research into real-world settings, this commentary mainly describes challenges and iterative experiences in regard to how the CTN develops its research protocols, with a focus on how the CTN study teams select and utilize assessment instruments that can reasonably balance the interests of both research scientists and practice providers when applied in CTN settings. This commentary also discusses the process by which the CTN has worked to identify a core set of common assessment instruments (the Common Assessment Battery (CAB)) that may be applied across all trials. Collecting clinically-relevant data in a uniform manner over time using the CAB will greatly facilitate future cross-study analyses, which could yield rich and important information to improve treatment of individuals with substance use disorders and to enhance the advancement of substance use disorder-related clinical research.