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ABSTRACT
Administrative data systems are a valuable resource for health care services research, especially in the assessment of treatment services for alcohol and drug dependence. However, clinical and diagnostic indicators are commonly not collected. The current report describes the development of a composite measure of substance abuse severity from items routinely recorded by publicly funded alcohol and drug abuse treatment services. Designed to capture varying patterns of substance use, the Severity Index can be readily calculated, interpreted and applied by health care providers as part of routine clinical care. To determine its validity, the performance of the Severity Index, was tested against the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), a well-researched measure of substance abuse severity.