How we work, in short
- Our team checks each listing. Nothing is imported.
- We don’t use APIs, syndicated feeds, or scraped data.
- We look providers up with the regulators.
- We read reviews, and we read them carefully.
- We confirm the address and the level of care.
- We don’t charge providers to be added.
Our team checks each listing
A member of our team opens the provider file, works through a checklist, and notes where each fact came from and when they checked it. Where we can’t trace something back to a regulator record or a call we made ourselves, we leave it off rather than guess. We don’t republish marketing copy.
- Legal name, trade names, and parent organization
- Current license status and license category
- Physical address, and whether it is a clinical site or an office
- Levels of care offered, checked against what the license permits
- Accreditation status and expiry date
- A direct phone number, dialed and confirmed
This is slow, and it caps how fast the directory grows. We accept that. A wrong phone number can end a family’s search for care.
No feeds, no APIs, no scraped data
We do not connect to a third-party API, buy a listings file, or scrape other directories. Bought data carries other people’s errors, and those errors spread quietly — a facility that closed in 2023 keeps appearing across a dozen sites because they all pull from the same file. When you build by hand, the mistake is yours to find, and the correction stops with you.
We check with the regulators
Tennessee licenses on two tracks, and it catches people out. The state Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services licenses services under Title 33. Residential programs above a certain bed count can also need a separate license under Title 68. A program can hold one and not the other, so we check both rather than accepting a general claim that a facility is “state licensed.”
Where we check
Facility license — the state Office of Licensure, for the license category and its status
Clinician credentials — the Tennessee Health Related Boards, which show license status and any disciplinary history
Federal records — the SAMHSA treatment locator, to cross-check services and site status
Accreditation — CARF and The Joint Commission, to confirm a survey happened and has not lapsed
Recovery housing — the certifying bodies approved by the state, since residences are certified rather than licensed
Every one of these is a public register. Nothing we do is private, and you can run the same searches yourself before you call anyone.
We read reviews carefully
Reviews tell you things a license file never will: whether the phone gets answered, whether families get called back. But review counts here are small and easily skewed, so we look for repetition rather than volume. One complaint about a surprise bill is a data point. Nine across three years describing the same surprise is a pattern, and we take that to the provider.
We ignore star averages on their own, single reviews with no detail, and batches of five-star posts filed within days of each other.
We confirm the address and the level of care
An address in a directory is often a corporate office or a call center in another state. People turn up expecting an admissions desk and find a mailbox. So we separate the clinical site from an administrative address, and where a number reaches a central intake line rather than the building itself, we try to say so.
Levels of care get the same treatment. Detox, residential, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient are different services with different licenses and different costs, and marketing copy blurs them constantly. Our listings describe each program by what its license actually permits. To compare the tiers first, see our pages on
medically supervised detox,
residential inpatient,
partial hospitalization, and
intensive outpatient.
We don’t charge providers to be added
There is no fee to be added to the directory. A provider cannot pay us to have a listing created, reviewed, or approved, and paying would not change the outcome of a check. Everything on this page happens the same way whether a provider has ever spoken to us or not.
What a listing does not mean
A listing is not a clinical recommendation or a quality ranking. Three things we can’t verify:
- Clinical outcomes. Programs are not required to publish outcome data in any comparable form, so we do not repeat success rates.
- Your coverage. A facility can be in network with an insurer and still be out of network for your plan or your level of care.
- Today’s conditions. Staff leave, ownership changes, waiting lists open and close. We recheck on a schedule, but no directory is current to the day.
So compare a few programs rather than calling the first one, confirm accreditation with the accreditor, and check your benefits with your insurer directly. Our
insurance pages cover what to ask, including
TennCare,
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee,
Medicare, and
VA Community Care.
Browse the directory
We work the same way across our TreatmentTennessee.com directory, from a county hub down to a single neighborhood.
Or browse by what you need:
programs,
therapies,
addiction,
mental health,
specialized care,
certified sober living, and
virtual IOP.
