The Substance Abuse Prevention Planning and Epidemiology Tool (SAPPET) is an online data tool designed to help SAMHSA-funded prevention grantees access and use data to guide their prevention planning efforts. The effectiveness of SAMHSA's Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) begins with a clear understanding of community needs. SAPPET offers practitioners immediate access to data that can help them understand and prioritize the substance-related problems their communities face.
 
SAPPET contains 151 behavioral health key indicators from 11 national data sources, and makes these data available by state. Indicators are categorized into substance-related consequences, consumption patterns, and associated risk and protective factors.
 
SAMHSA defines behavioral health as a state of mental/emotional being and/or choices and actions that affect wellness¹. Behavioral health problems include substance abuse or misuse, alcohol and drug addiction, serious psychological distress, suicide, and mental and substance use disorders. SAPPET focuses on a subset of these problems, specifically, substance-related outcomes and associated risk and protective factors. Some of the risk and protective factors included in this tool are also associated with mental health outcomes.
 

What's New on SAPPET?

Our name! Formerly the Behavioral Health Indicators System, SAPPET has been renamed to capture the essence of its functionality: to guide prevention planning and epidemiological analysis.
 
We have recently added 2012 and 2013 indicator data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BRFSS is a state-based system of telephone health surveys that collects information on health risk behaviors, preventive health practices, and health care access primarily related to chronic disease and injury. SAPPET now contains national- and state-level BRFSS data from 2005 - 2013. BRFSS data collection, structure, and weighting methodology changed in 2011 to allow data to be collected by cellular telephones, in addition to landline telephones; thereby limiting the comparability of 2011 onwards data to previous years. Therefore, SAPPET provides two separate trend graphs for each indicator (2005-2010 and 2011-2013), wherever available.
 

What's Inside*

View Data—View indicator prevalence and trend graphs for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Depending on data availability, customize graphs to compare state and national trends, trends across states, and counties within states.
 
Download Data—Download raw datasets by desired state or data source for further analysis. Data can be downloaded in SAS or CSV format.
 
Data Sources—Review brief descriptions of the 11 SAPPET data sources, including data collection methods and links to the data source.
 
Additional Resources—Explore a variety of resources and tools to facilitate data-informed decision making, including an index of epidemiology-related resources available on the Center for Application of Prevention Technologies (CAPT) area of the SAMHSA website.
 
FAQs—Learn more about the SAPPET tool and how it functions, including how to download SAPPET graphs into external software programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel.
 
References:
 

1. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Leading Change: A Plan for SAMHSA's Roles and Actions 2011-2014. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 11-4629. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2011.

 
^*While the majority of data contained in this tool was last updated in March 2013, SAPPET is currently being updated. We will notify users as new data becomes available.