How Treatment Compass Researches and Publishes
Most pages about addiction treatment cite each other. This one sets out where our figures actually come from, so you can check them rather than trust us.
Where the numbers come from
Every proportion on this site — how many facilities accept Medicaid, offer residential care, prescribe buprenorphine — is our own count of one public source: SAMHSA’s treatment locator at FindTreatment.gov. We pulled the full listing on , removed duplicate entries by name, street and ZIP, and counted how many of the remaining 10,233 facilities report each service.
SAMHSA publishes the directory. It does not publish these proportions — that calculation is ours, and it is the reason the figures here do not appear elsewhere. Repeat the pull and you should get the same numbers, give or take facilities that have opened or closed since.
What these numbers cannot tell you
They are self-reported by facilities. They describe availability, not quality. And a national proportion says nothing about what is open near you this week. Use them to know what to ask for, not to decide where to go.
How a page gets written
The order matters more than it sounds, because doing these steps in the wrong sequence is how pages end up answering a question nobody asked.
Read what already answers the question
Before writing anything we read the pages currently ranking for the query and record what they cover. Not to imitate them — most of the time the useful finding is what all of them skip, and that is only visible once you have read the set rather than one.
Collect what people actually type
We pull live search suggestions across several hundred variants per topic, which is the closest available record of the real question rather than our assumption about it. This step has changed the plan for a page more than once: for naltrexone the demand turned out to sit around the monthly injection and around alcohol, not around the comparison the page is named after.
Go to the primary source, not the summary
Claims with numbers in them are checked against the label, the regulation or the review itself. Summaries drift: a Cochrane finding about a structured clinical intervention gets quoted as though it were about attending meetings, and a rule that stopped being enforced in 2025 is still described as current. Reading the source is what catches that.
Say when a number does not generalise
Where a figure varies by state, plan or facility, we say so rather than publishing an average that reads as a fact. A precise-looking number that does not apply to the reader is worse than an honest range, because it stops them asking.
Date it, and mean the date
Every page lists the sources it used and when it was last checked. That date moves when the content is genuinely re-checked against those sources — not automatically on each visit, which is a practice that makes a date meaningless while looking reassuring.
Who writes it, and who does not review it
Pages are written by the Treatment Compass editorial team: researchers and writers, not clinicians. No doctor reviews this site, and we do not claim otherwise. Plenty of sites in this field display a clinician’s name and a “medically reviewed” stamp on thousands of pages nobody read. We would rather tell you what this is.
What that means in practice: we report what public clinical sources say and show you where to read them, rather than offering a clinical opinion of our own. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a recommendation to start or stop a medication, or a substitute for an assessment by someone who knows your history.
How this site is funded, and what we refuse
We do not operate treatment facilities. We take no placement fees, no referral commissions and no payment for sending anyone anywhere. There is no call centre behind a phone number on this site, because there is no phone number on this site — the numbers we publish are federal helplines that route to nobody we know.
Why the funding model shapes the advice
Much of this sector is paid per admission, and that changes what gets written. A page earning a commission has a reason to steer towards the most expensive level of care, to present residential treatment as the serious option and outpatient as the compromise, and to make contacting someone feel urgent. A page that earns nothing either way has no reason to do any of that — which is why we can say plainly that outpatient care is the right answer for a great many people.
What independence does not buy us
It does not make us clinically expert, and it does not make us right. Independence removes one specific distortion; it does not substitute for sources, and it is not a reason to trust a claim here that we have not shown you where to check.
What we count, and what each figure means
The directory records what each facility reports about itself across several categories — payment accepted, levels of care offered, medications used, populations served. We count each of those separately rather than blending them, because the categories are not interchangeable and mixing them produces figures that look precise and are wrong.
Why the same drug can show two different numbers
Buprenorphine appears in more than one category: as a type of opioid treatment, as a medication used in treatment, and as specific forms such as the extended-release injection. Those give 59.2%, 64.2% and 33.7% respectively — all correct, all measuring something different. We publish the first consistently across the site so our figures stay comparable with each other, and we name the category when it matters.
The error this discipline prevents
A loose search for “methadone” across every category returns 51.7% of facilities, because it also catches a combined category labelled “outpatient methadone/buprenorphine or naltrexone treatment”. The correct figure for methadone is 13.7%. We caught that because it was implausible on its face — methadone for opioid use disorder can only be dispensed through certified programmes, and there are not five thousand of those. A figure that survives only because nobody sanity-checked it is a figure waiting to be wrong.
Deduplication
The raw pull contains 12,054 records, and the same facility often appears more than once because it is listed under several service settings. We deduplicate by name, street and ZIP, which leaves 10,233 distinct facilities. Every percentage on this site uses that denominator.
The sources we go to first
When a page makes a claim with a number in it, that number comes from one of these rather than from another article:
- Prescribing information — the FDA-approved label, read through DailyMed, run by the National Library of Medicine. Dosing, warnings and boxed warnings come from there, not from a summary of a summary.
- The regulations themselves — read on eCFR. Federal rules on opioid treatment programmes and on the confidentiality of treatment records both changed recently, and older descriptions are still in circulation.
- Systematic reviews — Cochrane and peer-reviewed literature through PubMed, read for what they actually concluded, including the scope conditions that tend to get dropped when they are quoted.
- Federal agencies — NIDA, NIAAA, SAMHSA and the NCBI Bookshelf.
What we will not publish
Some of this is unusual enough in this field to be worth stating as policy rather than leaving implied.
No named reviewer we do not have
Sites in this sector routinely display a clinician’s name and a review date on pages that clinician never saw. That is a trust signal manufactured rather than earned. We would rather carry the disadvantage of saying plainly that no doctor reviewed this.
No phone number of our own
A prominent number on an addiction information page frequently routes to a call centre paid per admission. The numbers we publish are federal helplines — 988 and the SAMHSA National Helpline — and they reach nobody connected to us.
No urgency, and no invented statistics
No countdown timers, no “beds available now”, no success rates we cannot source. Where a number varies by state, plan or facility, we say so instead of publishing an average that reads as a fact.
Keeping pages current
This field changed materially in the past two years, and a page written before those changes is not merely dated — it is wrong. Federal rules for opioid treatment programmes were rewritten in 2024 for the first time in over twenty years, take-home medication stopped being a fixed formula, telehealth initiation became permanent, and enforcement of the updated confidentiality rules began in February 2026. Separately, a 2024 rule on insurance parity has been under non-enforcement since May 2025 while it is reconsidered, which most published material still does not reflect.
When we re-check a page against its sources, we change the date on it. When we have not, the old date stays visible so you can judge how current it is. See how those rule changes play out in practice, or what the parity position means for coverage.
Questions about how we work
Who pays for this site?
Nobody pays us to publish anything, and no facility pays to appear. There are no placement fees, no referral commissions, no sponsored placements and no advertising from treatment providers. If that changes, this page changes with it and the change will be dated.
Do you rank or recommend facilities?
No. We publish national and state-level proportions from a public directory and we explain how levels of care differ. We do not maintain a list of “best” centres, because we have no basis on which to judge one against another and the sites that do usually have a commercial one.
Can I reuse your figures?
Yes. The underlying directory is a US government work in the public domain; the counting is ours and we would rather it were checked than taken on trust. If you cite a figure, say what it counts and when it was pulled, because both change.
How often is the data refreshed?
The directory pull is dated on every block that uses it, so you can always see how old a figure is rather than having to trust that it is current. Facilities open and close continuously, so small movement between pulls is expected; a large movement would be a reason to check the method rather than to publish the difference.
What if a page contradicts my clinician?
Your clinician wins. They know your history, your other conditions and your other medications; this site knows none of those. What a page here is for is arriving at that conversation knowing which questions matter, not arriving with a conclusion.
How do I report an error?
Tell us what is wrong and where, and if you have the source that contradicts us, include it — that is the fastest route to a fix. Corrections that change meaning get the date on the page changed with them, so a reader can see the page moved.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. That includes figures that have gone out of date: regulations in this field changed substantially in 2024 and 2026, and material written before those changes is still circulating. When we correct a page, we change the last-checked date with it.
Read more about who we are on the about page, or start with the comparisons.
Where to start
- Inpatient vs outpatient
- Detox vs rehab
- PHP vs IOP
- Suboxone vs methadone
- Naltrexone vs Suboxone
- Sober living vs halfway house
- 12-step vs non-12-step
- Getting someone into treatment
- Paying without insurance
- Rules once you are there
- Opioid withdrawal timeline
- Aetna coverage
- Cigna coverage
- TRICARE coverage
- Humana coverage
- Ambetter coverage
- All comparisons
- All guides
- All insurers