The aim of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Oregon Partners Project, a new mental health services program, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for children who are severely emotionally disturbed. The project consists of a flexibly financed system of case management for 5 to 18 year-old children with severe emotional disturbance in Multnomah County, the major metropolitan county in Oregon. Effectiveness is conceptualized from the perspective of the """"""""fit"""""""" between client needs and system resources, as measured by the objectives set forth by the Child and Adolescent Service Program (CASSP), national Institute of Mental Health. These objectives specify that services should be comprehensive, individualized, least-restrictive, family centered, protective of rights, culturally appropriate, and sensitive to transition issues. A randomized research design will be used to assess the impact of flexible funding and case-management on (a) service fit, (b) child, family and system outcomes, and (c) case costs. A multifaceted evaluation plan will be used to accomplish this aim. Two separate treatment groups will be used, one of which will combine flexible funding with case management and the other of which will include case management without flexible funding. A third, """"""""conventional-services"""""""" comparison group will be used to assess the combined impact of case management and flexible funding. Project clients will be randomly assigned across groups to facilitate causal inferences about program effectiveness. The project will operationalize and monitor the extent to which case management and flexible funding contribute to the achievement of CASSP treatment goals and to improvements in child, family, and system outcomes. Identifying how different goals and outcomes respond to the same program components will serve to demonstrate the empirical feasibility of as yet untested philosophical treatment ideology in addition, the project will demonstrate the cost-impact of flexible financing and managed care as mechanisms for leveraging State Medicaid resources with Federal matching funds.
