A Systematic Process to Facilitate Evidence-Informed Decisionmaking Regarding Program Expansion

While the Department of Defense supports more than 200 psychological health and traumatic brain injury programs, it lacks an approach and process to systematically develop, track, and assess the performance of this portfolio of programs. Further, there is not yet a uniform approach to decisionmaking around program support and expansion of particularly promising, evidence-based programs. This lack of centralized oversight may result in the proliferation of untested programs that are developed without an evidence base; an inefficient use of resources; and added cost and administrative inefficiencies. RAND researchers developed a potential model and tools to support a centralized, systematic, and ongoing process to help in making decisions around continued program support, and by which expansion can be facilitated. This report includes two tools. The first is a Program Abstraction Form, which collects relevant background information from programs and asks explicitly about program effectiveness and the design of the program evaluation used to assess program effectiveness, as a poor evaluation design may lead to incorrect conclusions about the effectiveness of the program. The second is the RAND Program Expansion Tool, which provides a standardized summary of the quality and outcome of a program evaluation. The focus of these tools is on decisionmaking around program expansion, and does not preclude or address initial funding decisions of particularly promising new programs that may not yet have a solid evidence base.