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Abstract:
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Expanding access to opioid treatment has been a major objective of current and past administrations, yet data on actual program-specific treatment capacity is seriously lacking even among publicly funded programs. We present a method for overcoming limitations of existing data sources by building a comprehensive facility-level longitudinal database of state licensed substance abuse treatment facilities that contains measures of inpatient and outpatient treatment capacity and the number of clients receiving services by service setting for each facility, across multiple years. To do so, we estimate the distribution of capacity and client counts using the public use National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services and impute these measures for licensed facilities in the National Directory of Drug Use and Alcohol Abuse Treatment Facilities, which are then linked across years. We find and demonstrate the utility of this data system in terms of tracking capacity and identifying growth markets as compared to existing cross-sectional data sources.
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