A typology of organizational and contractual arrangements for purchasing and delivery of behavioral health care.

The evolution of behavioral health care financing and delivery has led to a wide variety of arrangements connecting consumers to behavioral health services. In this paper, we present a typology based on three distinguishing features of behavioral health arrangements along which there is a high degree of variability and this variability has been shown to affect the cost and quality of behavioral health care: (1) the extent to which sponsor oversight over care is outsourced by way of contracts rather than performed directly; (2) whether financing for behavioral health is partitioned from health care financing overall; and (3) the amount of financial risk shared by the sponsor with third parties.