Service components of case management which reduce inpatient care use for persons with serious mental illness.

This is a study of two types of case management: case management (CM) which provided the service coordination functions, and Intensive Case Management (ICM) which consisted of both the coordination function and the provision of direct support to the client. Using secondary data on public clients, characteristics of mental health service use were analyzed for 80 ICM and 84 CM clients. The ICM clients had significantly fewer episodes per patient and less inpatient days per year than the CM clients. These findings suggest that direct support services make a significant difference in reducing annual hospital care.