Overview. The mission of the OSCTR is to serve as a catalyst to facilitate clinical research into relevant health improvements for underserved and underrepresented populations living in rural areas, to improve patient outcomes, and to provide these resources to investigators and patients from other IDeA states. Thus, the OSCTR and its collaborating partners have identified the following goals: (1) Enhance the development of high-caliber OSCTR clinical translational scientists who focus on health issues of concern to our populations through training, mentoring and pilot grant opportunities, (2) Establish the OSCTR Research Navigator Service to facilitate access to research infrastructure, (3) Develop and share infrastructure to support Clinical and Translational Research (CTR) throughout Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alaska and future collaborating IDeA states, (4) Promote research on diseases with high prevalence among American Indians and Alaskan Natives, (5) Utilize and build registries and repositories to better understand disease mechanisms and to help launch junior OSCTR clinical investigative careers, (6) Engage communities through practice based research networks to identify and conduct research of highest interest to Oklahoma and other IDeA communities, (7) Mentor early stage OSCTR clinical investigators to research independence. Preliminary assessment reveals the complexity of the project, as it involves multiple institutions combining strengths in basic and applied research, clinical service, and practice research to enhance clinical care outcomes, particularly in addressing the needs of special populations. The proposed evaluation will work with the distinctiveness of this application to address the needs of stakeholders (broadly defined, e.g., OSCTR investigators, trainees, staff, community members) in the realization of the OSCTR goals. The Evaluation Core will rigorously evaluate the overall operational functions of the OSCTR and Key Component Activities (KCAs) and outcomes. In this proposal, we set out a broad plan to evaluate implementation of short-term and long-term goals using a goals-based evaluation framework and logic model (Figure 1). We will do this for the OSCTR as a whole, and will facilitate this level of evaluation within each of the KCAs. Note that KCA leaders have proposed specific milestones and tracking measures for the success of their operations in the activity and timeline tables later in this section. These primarily focus on process measures and represent one level of OSCTR evaluation
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