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Specialty Health Care, Treatment Patterns, and Quality: The Impact of a Mental Health Carve‐Out on Care for Depression

Year: 2002
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: OBJECTIVES: To assess the effect of a mental health carve-out on treatment patterns and quality of care for outpatient treatment of depression. DATA SOURCES: Outpatient and pharmaceutical claims from September 1993 through March 1997 for one large managed care organization in the Midwest that carved-out mental health and substance abuse benefits in September 1995. RESEARCH DESIGN: Using the treatment episode as the unit of analysis (n = 1,747), changes in treatment patterns associated with the change to a carve-out were evaluated. Logistic regression was used to assess whether in the postperiod a treatment episode was more likely to be treated with (1) an antidepressant and (2) a type and intensity of treatment with proven efficacy. To strengthen confidence in a causal relationship, I search for structural breaks in treatment patterns across a wide range of dates, assuming no a priori knowledge of the timing of the impact of the carve-out. RESULTS: I find the carve-out to be associated with an increase in the use of drug treatments. Although I find a decrease in the use of guideline-level treatment over the entire study period, there is an increase in the number of episodes treated with guideline-level treatment over what would be the case in the absence of the carve-out. CONCLUSIONS: The increase in the use of drug treatments suggests previous research that excluded these costs may have overestimated the savings attributable to carve-outs. Guideline-level care appeared to increase as a result of carve-out implementation suggesting the use of management and specialization to reduce costs is not antithetical to quality improvement.
DOI: 10.1111/1475-6773.11092
Institution: Yale University
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2124504200
FWCI: 8.644
Cites: 24
Cited by: 31
Related to: 10