The Treatment Episode Data Set -- Admissions (TEDS-A) is an administrative data system providing descriptive information about the national flow of admissions to providers of substance abuse treatment. TEDS-A is part of a reporting system that was originally designed to provide annual data on the number and characteristics of persons admitted to public and private substance abuse treatment programs receiving public funding. The unit of analysis is treatment admissions. TEDS includes both Minimum Data Set (MDS) data (required reporting) and Supplemental Data Set (SuDS) data (optional reporting), as reported to state substance abuse agencies by the treatment programs.
Variables in the MDS include: information on service setting, number of prior treatments, primary source of referral, gender, race, ethnicity, education, employment status, substance(s) abused, route of administration, frequency of use, age at first use, and whether methadone was prescribed in treatment. Supplemental variables include: diagnosis codes, presence of psychiatric problems, living arrangements, source of income, health insurance, expected source of payment, pregnancy and veteran status, marital status, detailed not in labor force codes, detailed criminal justice referral codes, and days waiting to enter treatment.
Substances abused include alcohol, cocaine and crack, marijuana and hashish, heroin, nonprescription methadone, other opiates and synthetics, PCP, other hallucinogens, methamphetamine, other amphetamines, other stimulants, benzodiazepines, other non-benzodiazepine tranquilizers, barbiturates, other non-barbiturate sedatives or hypnotics, inhalants, over-the-counter medications, and other substances.
Created variables include total number of substances reported, intravenous drug use (IDU), and flags for any mention of specific substances.
The public-use files were created using the data that were current as of October 2011 (the October 10, 2011, extract).
ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
Several limitations to the data exist and should be noted prior to using the TEDS files:
The number and client mix of TEDS records depends, to some extent, on external factors, including the availability of public funds. In states with higher funding levels, a larger percentage of the substance-abusing population may be admitted to treatment, including the less severely impaired and the less economically disadvantaged.
The primary, secondary, and tertiary substances of abuse reported to the TEDS are those substances that led to the treatment episode, and not necessarily a complete enumeration of all drugs used at the time of admission.
The way an admission is defined may vary from state to state such that the absolute number of admissions is not a valid measure for comparing states.
States continually review the quality of their data processing. As systematic errors are identified, revisions may be enacted in historical TEDS data files. While this system improves the dataset over time, reported historical statistics may change slightly from year to year.
States vary in the extent to which coercion plays a role in referral to treatment. This variation derives from criminal justice practices and differing concentrations of abuser subpopulations.
Public funding constraints may direct states to selectively target special populations, for example, pregnant women or adolescents.
TEDS consists of treatment admissions, and therefore may include multiple admissions for the same client. Thus, any statistics derived from the data will represent admissions, not clients. It is possible for clients to have multiple initial admissions within a state and even within providers that have multiple treatment sites within the state. TEDS provides a national snapshot of what is seen at admission to treatment, but is currently not designed to follow individual clients through a sequence of treatment episodes.
TEDS distinguishes between "transfer admissions" and "initial admissions." Transfer admissions include clients transferred for distinct services within an episode of treatment. Only initial admissions are included in the public-use file.
Some states have no Opioid Treatment Programs (OTPs) that provide medication-assisted therapy using methadone and/or buprenorphine. See the TEDS Crosswalks for information regarding data collected by each state.
Beginning with data released or re-released in 2012, changes were made to the full TEDS series going back to 1992. The changes consisted of the following:
The recoding schme of the variable DENTLF (Detailed Not in Labor Force Category) was changed. The cases for "Inmate of Institution" have been separated from "Other" and are now a stand alone category.
The recoding scheme of the variable DETCRIM (Detailed Criminal Justice Referral) was changed. The cases for "Prison" have been separated from "Probation/Parole" and are now a stand alone category. The same was done for the cases for "Diversionary Program" which were previously combined with "Other". But the cases for "Other Recognized Legal Entity" previously combined with "State/Federal Court, Other Court" have now been combined with the "Other" category.
The other change was to the codebook. The recode table (now Appendix B) now includes the original percentages of cases for each value on select variables listed in the table.
Beginning with data released or re-released in 2011, a change was made to the full TEDS series going back to 1992. The change consisted of all records where age was missing. These cases are now excluded from the dataset.
Beginning with data released or re-released in 2010, changes were made to the full TEDS series going back to 1992. The changes consisted of the following:
Clients 11 years old and younger are excluded from the dataset.
Puerto Rico now has its own category for Census Region and Division. Clients in Puerto Rico were formerly classified into the South Census Region and South Atlantic Census Division.
The state FIPS (STFIPS) variable is retained and a second state variable was dropped to reduce redundancy.
Value labels and question text are better aligned with the TEDS State Instruction Manual for Admissions Data .
The variable RACE is no longer recoded. Codes for (a) Asian (code 13) and (b) Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (code 23) are now retained. Previously these codes were combined into a single code (c), Asian or Pacific Islander (code 3). Each state may report any of the three codes. Therefore, all three codes remain in the data, unchanged from the way they are collected by the states.
It should be noted that the categories and codes in this public-use file differ somewhat from those used by SAMHSA and those found in the TEDS Crosswalks and in other reports. This is a result of the recoding that was performed to protect client privacy in creating the public-use file.
To further protect respondent and provider privacy, all Drug and Alcohol Services Information System (DASIS) unique identification numbers have been removed from the public-use data. Therefore, no linkages are possible between the TEDS and National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS) public-use files.
A series of TEDS state indicator variables were created that can be used in analyses to compare a particular state with all other states. These variables are only available for analysis or subsetting through the SAMHDA online analysis system. See the codebook for sample SPSS programming syntax on how to create state indicator variables on a downloaded file.
Users should consult the TEDS Crosswalks for a breakdown of the data collected in each state and their corresponding TEDS codes, including state-by-state descriptions of exceptions or anomalies in reporting practices.
The data are collected from the states by Synectics for Management Decisions, Incorporated.