Description & Citation--Study No. 25221

• Bibliographic Description
• Scope of Study
• Methodology
• Access and Availability

Bibliographic Description

25221

Treatment Episode Data Set -- Admissions (TEDS-A) -- Concatenated, 1992 to 2009

TEDS-A, Concatenated, 1992 to 2009

United States Department of Health and Human Services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Office of Applied Studies

United States Department of Health and Human Services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Office of Applied Studies

United States Department of Health and Human Services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Office of Applied Studies. Treatment Episode Data Set -- Admissions (TEDS-A) -- Concatenated, 1992 to 2009. ICPSR25221-v4. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2011-06-28. doi:10.3886/ICPSR25221.v4

Treatment Episode Data Set - Admissions (TEDS-A) Series

Scope of Study

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.

alcohol abuse, drug abuse, drug treatment, health care services, health insurance, intervention, mental health, substance abuse, substance abuse treatment, treatment programs

Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA)

United States

• 1992--2009

• 1992--2009

treatment admissions

Treatment admissions to substance abuse treatment programs in the United States receiving public funds. Treatment programs receiving any public funds are requested to provide TEDS-A data on publicly- and privately-funded clients. There are some instances, however, in which information is provided only for clients whose treatment is funded through public monies.

administrative records data

A change was made this year to the concatenated file. It is now broken down into 5-year parts except for Part 1 which contains only 3 years of data. Providing these smaller parts makes downloading the data files easier and quicker. It also allows the full suite of data formats (SAS, SPSS, and Stata) to be made available.

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 2011, a change was made to the full TEDS-A series. 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.

ICPSR created a series of TEDS state indicator variables 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 2000-2009 public-use files were created using the data that were current as of November 2010 (the 11/03/2010 extract).

The 1999 public-use file was current as of April 2005 (the 4/11/2005 extract).

The 1992-1998 public-use files were current as of May 2004 (the 5/11/2004 extract).

The SDA file will remain a single file that contains all years in the series concatenated together. Because of the large size of this file, the customized subset feature within SDA will not work. However, you may subset the data by downloading the entire data file, then selecting only the cases you require to create the subset. If this is not preferable to you, SAMHDA staff can assist in creating a customized subset for you. Please refer to either the PDF or HTML codebook for further instructions on making this request through SAMHDA user support.

The data are collected from the states by Synectics for Management Decisions, Incorporated.

Methodology

Administrative records from substance abuse treatment programs as reported to state substance abuse agencies.

All archived data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. The archive 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, the archive performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

• Performed consistency checks.
• Created variable labels and/or value labels.
• Standardized missing values.
• Created online analysis version with question text.
• Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.
• Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Access and Availability

Detailed file-level information (such as record length, case count, and variable count) is listed in the file manifest.

2009-04-06

Users are reminded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) that these data are to be used solely for statistical analysis and reporting of aggregated information, and not for the investigation of specific individuals or organizations.

• 2011-06-28 Added 2009 data to TEDS-A concatenated data file. Replaced 2000-2008 data with new extracts. The years of 1992 to 1999 were reprocessed in accordance with updated disclosure and processing decisions. Cases where age was missing have been excluded from the dataset. Minor changes to some variable labels, value labels, and question text were made to better align the variables with the information presented in the TEDS Admissions manual.

• 2010-05-04 Added 2008 data to TEDS-A concatenated data file. Replaced 2000-2007 data with new extracts. The years of 1992 to 1999 were reprocessed in accordance with updated disclosure and processing decisions. The variable SERVSET was renamed to SERVSETA to distinguish it from the service setting variable in the TEDS Discharge data.

• 2009-09-21 Updated the data file to correct a prior error that occurred in the original processing. The error occurred in the coding of the variable ROUTE3 for the state of Nebraska on the 2007 datafile.

• DS1: 1992 to 1994
• DS2: 1995 to 1999
• DS3: 2000 to 2004
• DS4: 2005 to 2009