National addiction treatment locator has critical flaws
At a psychiatric hospital in Michigan, Dr. Cara Poland’s patients were handed a sheet of paper to find follow-up care. The hospital had entered local ZIP codes on a website — run by the nation’s top substance use and mental health agency — and printed the resulting list of providers for patients to call.
But her patients who tried to use it often hit a wall, Poland said. They’d call a number only to find it disconnected, or they’d learn that a facility wasn’t accepting new patients, or that the clinician had retired or moved.
“It’s scary, because if you go to use the site, it’s got invalid information,” said Poland, an addiction-medicine doctor who is now an assistant professor in women’s health at Michigan State University. “People give up if they can’t find treatment. And we risk losing a life.”
The website, FindTreatment.gov, was launched by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2019 to help hundreds of thousands of Americans affected by addiction answer a crucial question: Where can I get treatment? It is a directory of more than 13,000 state-licensed treatment facilities, including information on what types of services are offered, which insurance plans are accepted, and what ages are served.
Clinicians, researchers, and patient advocates welcomed the repository as a critical first step to overcoming the fragmented addiction treatment landscape and centralizing information for patients. Most considered it a safer alternative to Googling “addiction treatment near me” and turning up potentially predatory marketers.
However, the same proponents say FindTreatment. gov and SAMHSA’s other treatment locators have critical flaws — inaccurate and outdated information, a lack of filtering options and little guidance on how to identify high-quality treatment — that are long overdue for attention.
“It’s being treated as a gold-standard tool, but it’s not,” Poland said.
With overdose deaths reaching record highs, “we need FindTreatment.gov to be better,” said Jonathan Stoltman, director of the Opioid Policy Institute in Michigan.
FindTreatment.gov is the first link that comes up on Google searches for rehab, he said. According to SAMHSA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it receives nearly 300,000 page views a month. It’s the tool many state and local helplines use when trying to connect someone to treatment.
SAMHSA spokesperson Christopher Garrett said in a statement that the agency “endeavors to keep the (tools) current.” If SAMHSA is informed of outdated information — such as an incorrect address, telephone number, or type of service offered — “we act upon that information,” he wrote. Such updates are made weekly.
In addition, SAMHSA surveys facilities yearly, using the responses to update FindTreatment.gov, Garrett wrote.
Bradley Stein, director of the Rand Opioid Policy Center, said improving the treatment locator would be helpful, but some of the criticism reflects more complex underlying issues — like the shortage of providers — that SAMHSA alone cannot solve.
“There’s going to be a limit to its value if everywhere basically has a waiting list,” Stein said.
In Ohio, one family took on the job of creating a treatment locator for the state. Bill Ayars lost his 28year-old daughter, Jennifer, to a drug overdose in 2016. At the time, FindTreatment.gov didn’t exist. Ayars simply had a notebook in which the family had written names of facilities they’d called to get Jennifer help. He wanted to give other families a better place to start.
In 2017, along with his then-fiancée, younger daughter and a few hired staff members, Ayars launched a treatment locator site. It eventually listed 1,200 addiction treatment providers across Ohio and garnered more than 200,000 visitors.
“We felt very good that we filled a gap,” said Ayars.
Ayars’ fiancée and staffers often spent 12 hours a day calling facilities and updating their information every six months. The project cost more than $100,000 a year, he said. So when SAMHSA launched FindTreatment. gov, Ayars retired the site directed visitors to the national resource instead.
It’s for families like Ayars’ that it’s crucial to improve FindTreatment. gov, experts say.
“People who are seeking help deserve to find immediate help,” said Jones in North Carolina. “Having a national treatment locator that is up to date and easily searchable is a first step in that recovery journey.”
Kaiser Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at Kaiser Family Foundation, an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.