Current mental health care environments: Why managed care is necessary.

Abstract

This article reviews the forces leading to the current emphases on managed mental health systems. Rapidly escalating costs, especially for inpatient care, and associated concerns for quality and patient outcomes, have led third-party payers and employers to demand more eifective cost and quality controls. The article describes and illustrates methodologies for managing mental health costs, and reviews issues related to evaluating the impact of managed care on costs and quality of patient care. This special section is a testament to the fact that managed care is beginning to affect the practice of professional psycholo-gists, and more important, that this trend is likely to continue. To practice effectively within such an environment, psycholo-gists need to understand the forces promoting the growth of managed care and the ways they stand to be affected by and potentially to benefit from this major shift in the way mental health and substance abuse treatment services will be delivered in the future (Bloom, 1990). Although professional psycholo-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.