Comprehensive Neuropsychological Assessment in Los Angeles
Based in Encino, serving clients throughout Los Angeles, including Beverly Hills, Malibu, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley.
Neuro Assessment Center provides comprehensive neuropsychological assessment for adolescents and adults whose clinical picture has not been fully explained, or has been explained in ways that have not held up. Dr. Daniel Hai, PsyD, specializes in evaluations that clarify what is driving the presentation when prior explanations have been incomplete, conflicting, or difficult to act on.
One Clinician,
Start to Finish
Some neuropsychology practices use trained psychometrists or trainees to administer testing, with the psychologist interpreting the results afterward. That model can work well. It is not the model here.
Dr. Hai personally conducts every hour of every evaluation. The clinical interview, the full testing battery, the scoring and interpretation, the feedback session, and the written report are all completed by the same clinician, and so is the administrative side: scheduling, records, and every email and phone call. Nothing about your case passes through technicians, trainees, or front-office staff.
That structure matters for two reasons. Clinically, the person interpreting your results is the person who watched them being produced, so the observations that occur during testing directly inform the findings: how a task is approached, where effort breaks down, what changes under load, what helps. Practically, it means your information stays in one set of hands from the first phone call to the final report.
Dr. Hai is a clinical neuropsychologist and licensed psychologist (California PSY 31877) whose practice centers on differential diagnosis in complex cases: presentations where several conditions may be interacting, where prior evaluations have conflicted, or where the findings need to hold up under scrutiny.
A test score is one piece of evidence. Understanding the person producing it is the larger task.
When Capable People Are Misread
Behavior is easy to misread when capacity is not understood.
Executive dysfunction can look like avoidance. Low processing speed can look like resistance. Working memory difficulty can look like carelessness. Rigid thinking can look like defensiveness. Strong verbal ability can make someone appear more functionally capable than they consistently are.
The same behavior can mean very different things depending on what is driving it. A person can be entirely sincere and still unable to execute. High intelligence, insight, and a strong verbal presentation do not always translate into stable day-to-day functioning.
Neuropsychological assessment is built to answer a different question: not why someone is not changing, but what they are actually able to do right now, and under what conditions. It separates what a person understands from what they can consistently organize, regulate, remember, execute, and sustain.
What a Comprehensive Neuropsychological Evaluation Includes
A comprehensive evaluation here is not a fixed battery of tests followed by a report. It is a clinical investigation organized around a specific question.
Built Around the Question
There is no single fixed battery administered to every person. Testing is selected according to the referral question, the history, prior findings, and the clinical picture as it develops during the evaluation. Depending on the case, the battery can extend across attention, executive functioning, memory, learning, language, processing speed, social cognition, emotional functioning, personality, and academic skills. The goal is not to administer the greatest number of tests. It is to collect the evidence needed to answer the question accurately.
Function Beyond the Score
What a person can produce during a structured testing session does not always predict what they can sustain in daily life. The evaluation therefore interprets scores alongside how performance changes with complexity, cognitive load, fatigue, time pressure, emotional activation, structure, repetition, and breaks. That distinction matters most for people who are bright, verbally strong, medically complicated, or skilled at compensating: able to perform well for a few hours while struggling to sustain the same level of functioning outside a structured testing setting.
The Full Record Is Part of the Evidence
Complex presentations rarely make sense from testing alone. When clinically relevant, prior evaluations, treatment records, medical information, and school records are reviewed longitudinally, as a history with a shape, rather than treated as background paperwork. Interviews with family members, therapists, psychiatrists, physicians, or educators are added when their perspective can resolve a discrepancy or establish how functioning has changed across settings and over time. The purpose is not to collect more information for its own sake. It is to determine which explanation best accounts for the full pattern.
Findings Become a Plan
The report explains the case. Feedback turns the findings into a plan. In addition to the formal report, Dr. Hai prepares separate feedback materials that organize the major findings, explain them in accessible language, and translate the results into treatment priorities and next steps. Recommendations are individualized rather than generated from a standard list, and when a specific clinician, program, medical specialist, or educational resource is indicated, the referral is made as specifically as possible.
Questions a Neuropsychological Evaluation Can Answer
Many clients arrive after years of partial explanations, conflicting opinions, or treatment that helped some things without explaining the whole picture. The referral questions tend to be specific:
- Is this ADHD, autism, trauma, anxiety, a learning difficulty, executive dysfunction, or some combination?
- Why does someone understand exactly what needs to be done and still struggle to carry it out?
- Why does performance look strong in one setting and collapse in another?
- Why has treatment stalled despite insight and engagement?
- Are the cognitive complaints psychiatric, neurological, medical, developmental, substance-related, or mixed?
- What can this person realistically sustain in school, work, relationships, and independent life?
The purpose of the evaluation is to move from competing explanations to an answer specific enough to guide decisions.
A Deliberately Limited Caseload
Comprehensive evaluations are accepted in limited numbers.
The testing appointment is the visible portion of the evaluation. A typical comprehensive case involves approximately 7–9 hours with the client and 25–35 hours of total clinician time across interview, testing, records, collateral information, scoring, interpretation, research, report preparation, quality review, feedback, and treatment planning. Most of those hours occur outside the testing room. A limited caseload is what makes that level of involvement possible.
Complex cases often contain contradictory evidence, and a responsible evaluation accounts for the contradictions rather than forcing them into a convenient diagnosis. When findings raise a question outside the scope of neuropsychology, Dr. Hai consults with specialists in the relevant discipline rather than extending a conclusion beyond what the evidence can support. The aim is not certainty where certainty does not exist. It is an explanation that is careful, defensible, and clinically useful.
After the Evaluation: Feedback, Treatment Planning, and Referrals
A technically accurate report has limited value if nobody knows what to do with it. The evaluation ends with a plan, and the plan does not stop at the report.
When appropriate and authorized, post-assessment work can include direct communication with treating professionals to clarify findings, clinically appropriate supporting documentation, school or testing accommodation recommendations when the data support them, and referrals matched to the specific needs identified during the evaluation. Dr. Hai maintains working relationships with clinicians and programs across behavioral health and related specialties, so recommendations can point to specific people and resources. When it helps, that includes making the introduction directly rather than handing over a name and leaving the client to navigate the next step alone.
The objective is continuity between the evaluation and what happens next.
Who Refers Here
Psychiatrists, therapists, treatment programs, physicians, attorneys, schools, and families come to Neuro Assessment Center when the case is not straightforward: diagnostic uncertainty, conflicting impressions among providers, stalled treatment, complicated medical or developmental histories, or prior evaluations that have not adequately explained the presentation.
The practice is located in Encino and works with clients and referring professionals across the San Fernando Valley, greater Los Angeles, and the Malibu treatment community.
Neuropsychological Assessment Services
Neuropsychological Assessments
The Assessment Process
Psychoeducational Assessment
Adult ADHD & Autism Differential Assessment
Executive Dysfunction in High-Functioning Adults
Neuropsychological Assessment for Adolescents & Young People
Testing Accommodations Evaluations
Neuropsychological Testing for Treatment Programs
Complex Trauma, Mood, Personality, & Cognition
Depression and Cognitive Decline: When the Picture Is Not Clear
Neuropsychological Evaluation for Disability, Conservatorship, & Medicolegal Purposes
Post-Assessment Planning
Conditions Commonly Assessed
ADHD and autism spectrum differentials. Executive dysfunction. Trauma and complex trauma. Mood, anxiety, and personality dynamics. Learning differences. Memory concerns and cognitive changes. Concussion and mild traumatic brain injury. Substance-related cognitive and behavioral complications. Complex presentations involving more than one possible explanation.
