Utilization management analysis for children's mental health services.

Efficient identification of high-cost child and adolescent consumers of public mental health services using existing utilization and cost data is illustrated, along with analyses that profile these high-cost consumers and demonstrate the effect on total service cost per client of providing case management. The results indicate that providing high levels of case management services is not correlated with reductions in total service costs and that there is a need in the service system for using high-cost case management review techniques to control service utilization and lower costs.