;The Clinical Assessment Core will provide a range of services to Center investigators to assist in recruitment and the conduct of clinical assessments. Specifically, the Clinical Assessment Core will: (1) Assist in recruitment to Center studies;(2) Assist in assessments in studies by providing clinical and self-report behavioral assessments;(3) Coordinate baseline medical screenings (conducted at the CTSA), (4) Provide diagnostician recruitment, training, and ongoing calibration;(5) Administer a core battery in all Center pilot treatment studies and (where possible) ROIs that includes the Risk Assessment Battery, Beck Depression Inventory, and SF-12. Potential users of the Core will be alerted of the resource availability of the Penn CFAR Clinical Core (co-director: Gross) through a wide variety of mechanisms and by highlighting its services as part of Center wide dissemination efforts. The Clinical Assessment Core will continuously monitor and regularly evaluate each of the services that it will provide. In addition, the functioning of the Clinical Assessment Core as a whole will be evaluated through the use of a standard evaluation form, asking about strengths and weaknesses of the Core, completed by all Center investigators who have had contact with the Core over the previous year. Summary of the feedback from investigators will be given to the Center Executive Committee, Internal Advisory Board, and External Advisory Committee for comments and suggestions. The Clinical Assessment Core will be directed by Paul Crits-Christoph, who has extensive experience as an NIH Center Director and in the assessment of patients for psychiatric studies, and co directed by Pablo Tebas and Robert Gross, who have extensive experience in the treatment of patients with HIV/AIDS and in recruiting such patients for clinical research studies.
The overall aim of the Clinical Assessment Core is to assist investigators in meeting the requirements of clinical psychiatric research for reliable and valid identification and description of patient samples, reliable administration of standard clinical interviews, and collection of self-report measures using procedures that will maximize the reliability and validity ofthe data.
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