Parent and institutional agreement on children's use of mental health services

Abstract

Discussions about health care reform often center on managed care models of service delivery. With pressures to contain health care costs while maintaining the quality of care, evaluations of managed care have become increasingly critical. Instrumental to evaluations of managed care, or any service system, is reliable information on service utilization. Data on service use by child clients can come from a variety of sources, including parents reports and organizational records. This paper assesses the reliability of parent reports of children's use of mental health services by comparing their reports of the types and amount of services received to institutional claims data. The results show that parents can provide valuable information on service use, and that their reliability depends on the type of service rendered. While agreement between the two data sources is rather strong overall, it is not perfect. Implications of these findings for evaluating service utilization are discussed.