Comparing and Evaluating Substance Use Treatment Utilization Estimates from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and Other Data Sources

This report presents an evaluation of the coverage, overlap, biases, strengths, and weaknesses of three sources of data on the receipt of specialty substance use treatment: the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), and the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS). Specialty substance use treatment measures compared include numbers and characteristics of persons treated in a given year, single-day treatment counts, numbers of admissions in a given year, and estimates of the numbers of persons who needed substance use treatment but did not receive it. This report includes data from the 2005 through 2010 NSDUHs; 2007 through 2009 N-SSATS; and 2007 through 2009 TEDS. Results are show by substance treated, age, race/ethnicity, and employment status,