SMART Designs for Adaptive Interventions - Online Course

Diseases or disorders such as substance abuse, depression, obesity, ADHD, autism, HIV, diabetes, and cancer require sequences of treatments over time to address changing characteristics of the disease and the patient. Dynamic Treatment Regimens (DTRs) or Adaptive Interventions (AIs) provide guidelines to address the changing needs of disease and the patient. Specifically, AIs are a sequence of decision rules that specify whether, how, for whom, or when to alter the dose, type, or delivery of pharmacological, behavioral, and/or psychosocial treatments.

Effective AIs can be developed and studied in clinical trials called sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs). A SMART is a multi-stage trial design that allows for individuals to be randomized at two or more stages based on intermediate outcomes to inform the construction of AIs. The development of AIs from SMARTs is useful for building an evidence base for personalized intervention sequences. SMARTs can also be used to investigate tailored implementation strategies for prevention or uptake of evidence-based practices.

SMART designs also inform educational research, as well as other domains, in that school personnel may need to adaptively refine intervention(s) to accommodate the changing contexts and demands of schools. For example, the same intervention may not equally impact two different students or may not equally impact the same student over time. An adaptive intervention may “step up” to meet the needs of students who need a more intensive treatment, for example, or may “step down” for students who responded well to an earlier intervention.

In this workshop, we provide an introduction to dynamic treatment regimens and describe how SMART designs can be used to develop high-quality AIs. Emphasis is on both the design of SMARTs and also on the analysis of SMART data. Discussion around primary, secondary, and exploratory aims, power and sample size, and analytic methods will help researchers who are interested in designing a SMART, as well as those who are ready to analyze SMART data. A variety of case studies will be presented to illustrate SMART design and analytic methods throughout the workshop.

Starting May 10, we are offering this seminar as a 3-day synchronous*, livestream workshop held via the free video-conferencing software Zoom. Each day will consist of two lecture sessions which include hands-on exercises, separated by a 1-hour break. You are encouraged to join the lecture live, but will have the opportunity to view the recorded session later in the day if you are unable to attend at the scheduled time.

*We understand that finding time to participate in livestream courses can be difficult. If you prefer, you may take all or part of the course asynchronously. The video recordings will be made available within 24 hours of each session and will be accessible for four weeks after the seminar, meaning that you will get all of the class content and discussions even if you cannot participate synchronously. 

Closed captioning is available for all live and recorded sessions. Live captions can be translated to a variety of languages including Spanish, Korean, and Italian. For more information, click here.