The Clinical Services Core promotes research on clinically-relevant impacts (quality of care, health outcomes, cost-effectiveness) or alternative forms of managed care, especially variations in intensity of utilization review, patient payment, and physician reimbursement, for persons with psychiatric disorders. The Core also describes and evaluates quality improvement programs, such as outcomes management and disease management systems, within managed care settings, contrasting implementation of programs developed within managed care and those developed for research purposes but disseminated across managed care settings. Further the Core develops improved capacities for cost- effectiveness analyses for research on managed care for psychiatric disorders. There are areas of clinical services research which have been rarely applied to studies of managed care for psychiatric disorders. These research goals are explored in three main Core projects. Each project uses Center data bases, including proprietary data sets from companies in the Center's Managed Care Consortium, and a large primary and secondary data sets. The projects develop methods and concepts and results in data for publications and also serve as preliminary data for new research proposals. The Core is supported by resources from the Administrative Core and consultation from investigations in the other center cores. The Core also sponsors two Working Groups. The Minority Research Group develops new research proposals on quality improve for minorities with psychiatric disorders under managed care. The Science Working Group conducts original methodological and conceptual research from an interdisciplinary perspective on clinical services and technology dissemination for psychiatric disorders, i.e., the sciences of clinical services research. The Core includes clinicians (psychiatrists, internists, nurses), some of whom also have degrees in history or philosophy, a sociologist, and policy analysts.
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