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Method

How the treatment facility figures are made

How the pages of the Treatment facilities hub read what their publishers put out, and what that record can and cannot say. The method every topic shares — where a figure comes from, snapshots, freshness and corrections — is on the site’s methodology page.

What SAMHSA’s directories list

SAMHSA’s National Directories list facilities that, in its words, “(1) are licensed, certified, or otherwise approved for inclusion in the Directory by their State Substance Use Agencies, and (2) responded to” its annual survey, N-SUMHSS. Every service is as the facility reported it. SAMHSA publishes them as workbooks, one for substance use and one for mental health, which this site reads whole.

Medication for opioid use disorder

A listing offers it when its codes under “Opioid Medications used in Treatment” include methadone (MU), buprenorphine (BU) or naltrexone (NU), as SAMHSA prints them. A federally certified Opioid Treatment Program is SAMHSA’s code OTP.

How a facility is told apart

SAMHSA publishes no identifier. A facility here is its address and phone as SAMHSA prints them, so one place with several programs is one page, and a facility that moves or changes its phone starts a new page. One SAMHSA no longer lists keeps its page, marked “no longer listed by SAMHSA”, and is not indexed.

How the “What this means” line is made

Under the substance use listings figure on the hub, one sentence sets it at the scale of a place: the median rate of substance use listings per 100,000 residents among the places the Census Bureau has a population for. The median is taken in the query that returns the national row, from each place’s listings and population, not on the page. With an even number of places the median is the average of the two middle places, and the line says so.

A listing is a facility, never a person, so no floor applies to it. The line is not a sum of rows and says nothing about any one place, and a place with no Census population is not in it. The label “The Factbook’s calculation” on the line links here, and the query it comes from is named on the line.

What this data cannot show

  • The directory is not every facility: a facility is listed only if its state agency approved it and it answered SAMHSA’s voluntary annual survey. A facility that did not answer is absent, not closed.
  • Every service is as the facility reported it to the survey the year before the directory’s title, and SAMHSA asks readers to verify it with the facility.
  • A listing is not a license, a rating or a measure of quality. States license treatment facilities; SAMHSA does not.
  • A place can be listed more than once, as separate programs and in both directories, so counts are of listings.

Sources

Data retrieved