Preventive Health Services Administration Bureau of Injury and Disability Prevention Post-Treatment Tracking Project (PTTP) The Post-Treatment Tracking Project: Helps patients maintain their treatment programs. Helps patients keep clean during and after treatment. Develops and maintains one-on-one relationships with patients. Ensures strict privacy about patients' treatment. The Bureau of Injury and Disability Prevention's Post-Treatment Tracking Project documents the outcome of substance abuse treatment and serves as a liaison between clients and treatment providers. Assessments and counseling allow for possible relapse prevention. The project involves 1,000 clients age 18 and older, randomly selected from the annual 13,000-plus residents of the District of Columbia who seek treatment from the Department of Health's Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration. Tracking specialists provide an initial assessment of the client using a modified version of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), providing comprehensive insight into the client's strengths and weaknesses. Tracking specialists contact clients at regular intervals, receiving updates on their progress and providing referrals to various service agencies. Tracking specialists have proven particularly helpful in assisting clients, once having dropped out, to successfully gain re-entry into treatment. This is a process that is a bit more involved than it appears on the surface, given the great demand for treatment and the limited number of slots available for certain kinds of treatment--namely inpatient and methadone treatment. The re-entry assistance helps foster trust between the client and the tracking specialist, while also minimizing the amount of time that the client remains at risk for relapse. All data collected is entered into a central database for analysis, which is reported periodically reports to the Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration. Over the course of the past 3½ years the project has encountered significant growing pains, rising to meet the challenge on each occasion, whilst continuing to provide an often overlooked but altogether invaluable service to the residents of the District of Columbia.