BACKGROUND: Publicly funded mental health systems are increasingly implementing managed care systems, such as capitation, to control costs. Capitated contracts may increase the risk for disenrollment or adverse outcomes among high cost clients with severe mental illness. Risk-adjusted payments to providers are likely to reduce providers' incentives to avoid or under-treat these people. However,...

This chapter summarizes the recent literature on risk adjustment, synthesizing the theoretical and empirical literatures, emphasizing areas of current research and policy interest. The paper relates optimal risk adjustment to the previous theory and empirical work. The empirical estimation section covers choice of an objective function, different types of information that can be used, conceptua...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Transient ischemic attack (TIA) is generally considered a risk factor for death and cardiovascular events. This assumption is based on comparisons of the survival of the TIA population with that of the general population. Such comparisons may provide biased estimates of the risk associated with TIA because the general population is usually more healthy than TIA patients. ...

The Clinton proposal recognizes the need for successful risk adjustment and calls for the National Health Board to promulgate a risk adjustment formula by 1 April 1995. Unfortunately, risk adjustment technology is primitive; using observable characteristics such as age only slightly ameliorates the flawed incentives of not adjusting at all. Without major improvements in risk adjustment technolo...

background: adjustment disorder (ajd) is a transient mental health condition emerging after stressful life events. its diagnostic criteria have recently been under revision which led to the development of the adjustment disorder–new module 20 (adnm-20) as a self-report assessment. objective: to identify a threshold value for people at high risk for ajd. methods: as part of a randomized controll...