Capturing drug use patterns at a glance: An n-ary word sufficient statistic for repeated univariate categorical values.

Representing substance use patterns as a "word" allows researchers and clinicians an "at a glance" assessment of participants' responses to treatment over time. Further, machine readable use pattern summaries are a standardized method to calculate treatment outcomes and are therefore useful to all future SUD clinical trials. We discuss some caveats when applying this data summarization technique in practice and areas of future study.