NIDA CTN Common Data Elements
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This page provides a single source for National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Clinical Trials Network (CTN)-recommended Common Data Elements (CDEs) of Substance Use Disorders for use in clinical trials and electronic health records (EHRs).
Common data elements (CDEs) are standardized, precisely defined questions paired with a set of specific allowable responses, used systematically across different sites, studies, or clinical trials to ensure consistent data collection. The use of CDEs supports the 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy by making data from different studies more interoperable.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) encourages the development and use of common data elements for clinical research, patient registries, and other human subject research in order to improve data quality and opportunities for comparison and combination of data from multiple studies and with electronic health records.
All the CDEs displayed on this NIDA CTN CDE website are created and housed in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR). The caDSR is a repository of data elements and case report forms that assists investigators in identifying and selecting data elements for use in their projects, with contributions from 7 NIH agencies and other collaborating institutions. All CDEs are created according to guidelines from the ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry standard.
In addition, the NIDA CTN CDEs are shared with the NIH community in a collaborative effort initially hosted on the NIH CDE Repository and moved to the CTN Dissemination Library in March 2026. Through participation on the CDE Working Group of the Trans-NIH BioMedical Informatics Coordinating Committee (BMIC), the NIDA CTN CDEs provide a consensus-based set of CDEs for the screening and initial assessment of substance use disorders (SUDs) that can be integrated into general medical settings and enable the integration of SUD treatment within mainstream health care in electronic health records and clinical research.
For ease of use and understanding, the CDEs on this page are organized into data collection instruments that are familiar to work in clinical studies and health records. Each instrument contains a group of CDEs related by the topic for data collection, but individual CDEs also can be selected independently, although usage of CDEs separate from a complete instrument may require validation.