The National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers (NAATP) continues to set the standard for data-driven quality improvement in the substance use treatment community. At its May annual conference in Florida, NAATP formally presented the latest findings from the Foundation for Recovery Science and Education (FoRSE) Addiction Treatment Outcomes Program, offering a detailed look at who the nation’s leading treatment facilities are serving and how those patients are faring.
Annie Peters, Ph.D., NAATP’s director of research and education, spoke in advance of the conference about the need for addiction treatment providers to take advantage of the technological advancements that are allowing for deeper analysis of treatment data.
“There’s power in your data — this is where the stories exist,” Peters said. “The payers, the policymakers are seeing it in your data.”
The latest FoRSE report, based on year 2025 data from 202 participating treatment organizations, affirms treatment trends that have been identified in past years’ surveys:
- The length of time a patient is engaged in treatment has a profound effect on outcome. Spending at least 30 days in treatment reduces risk of relapse by 27% compared with a shorter treatment stay. Leaving treatment early against medical advice increases the risk of relapse by a staggering 80%.
- Time spent in substance use treatment results in substantial reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety. Greater severity of these symptoms at treatment admission lessens the chances of success, a reality that Peters said points to the need for programs to be capable of addressing patients’ co-occurring mental health issues. This is also a key recommendation in the widely used ASAM Criteria for patient placement. “We need to recognize that folks who come in are going to have trauma, depression, anxiety,” Peters said.
- Receiving treatment also results in significant improvements in “recovery capital,” the individual, family and community resources that clients can draw from to sustain a meaningful recovery.
Future FoRSE data sets could generate even more actionable findings, as a revised program structure will now require NAATP membership for facility participation in the outcomes project. Peters believes this will enhance participating treatment centers’ ability to use the organization-specific data for benchmarking, because all NAATP facilities adhere to the same standards for credentialing, ethics and quality assurance as a condition of membership in the association. “This will make the data set more valid,” she said.
NAATP’s announcement of the latest annual data states, “Since its inception, FoRSE has worked to unite treatment providers around common measures and shared outcomes reporting, addressing a longstanding gap in transparent, standardized data on addiction treatment effectiveness.”
NAATP also pointed out that this groundbreaking effort would not be possible without the contributions of its technology partners, of which we at Sigmund are proud to be a part. The FoRSE report states, “Relationships with FoRSE Technology Partners are key to the success of FoRSE’s work. These strategic collaborators create the essential connection to the FoRSE [application programming interface] for their customers, allowing FoRSE data sites to efficiently participate in the FoRSE Outcomes Program.”
