Population-Based Guidelines for Performance Measurement: A Preliminary Report

This paper describes the development of--and early efforts to validate--guidelines that indicate average amounts of service expected to be used by a population of patients with a given disorder who are served by a comprehensive mental health system. These guidelines address expected service use by individuals in 55 diagnostic groups. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a gauge for evaluating the amounts of service being delivered by managed care organizations. Three population-based guidelines (for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia) are compared to actual amounts of service delivered to enrollees in large behavioral health care systems.