The Computer-Assisted System for Patient Assessment and Referral (CASPAR) is a comprehensive assessment and services planning process used by substance abuse clinicians to conduct an initial assessment, generate a treatment plan, and link clients admitted to a substance abuse treatment program to appropriate health and social services available either on site within the program or off site in the community. The intervention relies on the CASPAR software package, downloaded to a personal computer, that consists of two Microsoft Windows-based applications designed to work sequentially.
The first application is an electronic version of the widely used Addiction Severity Index (ASI) called the Drug Evaluation Network System (DENS) ASI. The ASI is a research-derived problem assessment interview that measures the type and severity of difficulty across seven domains: medical, employment, alcohol use, drug use, legal status, family/social relationships, and psychiatric functioning. The computer-assisted DENS ASI provides item-by-item instructions for the interviewing counselor, including coding and probing suggestions. There are 150 automated consistency checks built into the program to ensure accurate coding fidelity to the ASI interview, and all items are range checked. The software also generates narrative reports and client-level treatment plan problem lists on a form that can be used to manually draft a treatment plan.