• Decision support: a collaborative endeavor
• Decision support using models
• Nonmodeling decision-support approaches
• Alignment between policy questions and decision-support approaches
• Recommendations and discussion.

"This report describes decision-support tools, including models and nonmodeling approaches, that are relevant to infectious disease prevention, detection, and response and aligns these tools with real-world policy questions that the tools can help address. The intended audience includes technical experts - for example, modelers and subject-matter experts - and the policymakers that those experts can support. On one hand, this overview should help modelers and other technical experts understand the questions that policymakers will raise and the decisions they must make. On the other hand, many policymakers can benefit from a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the different tools that may inform their decisions. This report describes the characteristics, requirements, uses, applicability, and limitations of three classes of theory-based models (population, microsimulation, agent-based simulation) and two classes of statistical models (regression-based and machine-learning), as well as several complementary nonmodeling decision-support approaches. The report then aligns all of these tools and approaches with a set of real-world policy questions. Finally, based on a review of published literature, an assessment of the different models and nonmodeling approaches, and recent experiences (such as the 2009 influenza pandemic), the authors recommend nine best practices for using modeling and decision-support tools to inform policymaking"--Back cover.

• Introduction
• Need for a research and evaluation capability : becoming a high-performing organization
• Need for a research and evaluation capability : accreditation requirements
• Structure and scope of an office of institutional research : findings from interviews
• Lessons learned from organizations with training missions similar to that of METC
• Conclusions and recommendations.

"Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction and overview
• Identify your program's core components and build a logic model
• Design an evaluation for your program
• Select evaluation measures for your program
• Analyze your program's evaluation data
• Use evaluation data to improve your program
• Appendix A: Summary of program evaluation studies, by program type
• Appendix B: Glossary of terms.

Evaluating suicide prevention programs can be challenging because suicide is a rare event, data on suicides often lag by several years, and programs tend to have multiple components, making it difficult to discern which characteristics contributed to a given outcome. The RAND Suicide Prevention Program Evaluation Toolkit was designed to help program staff overcome these common challenges to evaluating and planning improvements to their programs. It begins by walking users through the process of developing a program logic model that ties program activities to intermediate outcomes, helping staff better understand the drivers of any changes in long-term outcomes, such as suicide rates. It then offers information about the latest evaluation research, helps users design an evaluation that is appropriate for their program type and available resources and expertise, supports the selection of measures for new evaluations and to augment or enhance ongoing evaluations, and offers basic guidance on how to analyze and use evaluation data for program improvement. Through checklists, worksheets, and templates, the toolkit takes users step by step through the process of identifying whether their programs produce beneficial effects, ultimately informing the responsible allocation of scarce resources. The toolkit⁰́₉s design and content are the result of a rigorous, systematic review of the program evaluation literature to identify evaluation approaches, measures, and tools used elsewhere and will be particularly useful to coordinators and directors of suicide prevention programs in the U.S. Department of Defense, Veterans Health Administration, community-based settings, and state and local health departments. A companion report, Development and Pilot Test of the RAND Suicide Prevention Program Evaluation Toolkit, offers additional background on the toolkit⁰́₉s design and refinement.

• Preface
• Figures and tables
• Summary
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Literature review of military and civilian practices and guidelines for prescription drug misuse
• U.S. Department of Defense policies
• Clinical practice guidelines, consensus statements, and published systematic reviews
• Systematic review of original studies in the research literature
• Conclusions
• 3. Designing a tool to assist in identifying prescription drug misuse among current and future active-duty service members
• 4. Our qualitative assessment of military health providers' views on prescription drug misuse
• Introduction
• Methods
• Limitations of our approach
• Findings
• 5. Recommendations and conclusions
• Appendixes
• Bibliography.

"Prescription drug misuse (PDM) is of critical concern for the military because of its potential impact on military readiness, the health and well-being of military personnel, and associated health care costs. The purpose of this report is to summarize insights gleaned from a series of activities that the RAND Corporation undertook for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness to address this important health and military readiness issue. The authors completed a review of U.S. Department of Defense policies and a comprehensive literature review of clinical guidelines and the empirical literature on the prevention and treatment of PDM and conducted individual face-to-face interviews with 66 health and behavioral health care providers at nine medical treatment facilities across three regions within the contiguous United States to identify best practices in the prevention, identification, and treatment of PDM and the extent to which those practices are known and followed. The report also presents the framework of an analytic tool that, once informed by data available to the military but not available to the authors, can assist the military in predicting future trends in PDM based on current demographics of active-duty service members and rates of injury and prescribing of prescription drugs. The findings from this work led the authors to formulate a set of key insights that they believe might improve the rapid identification and treatment of service members dealing with PDM, thereby improving future force readiness"-- Publisher's description.