Development of a "treatment program" descriptor: the addiction treatment inventory.

This paper reviews the current literature on the definition and classification of drug and alcohol user treatment "programs," and provides a rationale for our approach to measuring the treatment programs in the Drug Evaluation Network System (DENS). The DENS gathers extensive background and recent status data on patients' drug, alcohol, psychiatric, medical, employment, legal, and family problems as they enter a sample of treatment programs throughout the country. The DENS recognized the need for descriptive information on important structural, organizational, and service delivery aspects of the programs in which those patients were treated. To this end, we present our efforts thus far in characterizing and monitoring "service delivery units" or "programs" that are sampled in the DENS system. Specifically, we present development of the Addiction Treatment Inventory (ATI), a standardized measurement instrument to characterize these service delivery units and their services.