Brief report: parent report about health care use: relationship to child's and parent's psychosocial problems.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the potential utility of asking parents about health care utilization as a means of identifying individuals at risk for psychosocial problems. METHOD Parents of 366 children ages 2 to 16 completed questionnaires about their own, their child's, and their family's psychosocial functioning and health care utilization. RESULTS Children and parents with high health care utilization were more likely to have psychosocial problems than those with low health care utilization. Sensitivity and specificity of health care utilization as a marker for psychosocial problems ranged from 43.8% to 68.8%. CONCLUSIONS Although high rates of child health care utilization are related to the presence of psychosocial problems, use of this measure alone could result in many false-positive and false-negative identifications. Rather, use of health care utilization data in conjunction with other screening measures may be useful for alerting physicians to the possibility of both child and parent psychosocial problems.