Facilitating comparisons between evaluations of case management programs

We need to know if, as an overall approach to service delivery, case management is delivering on its promises of improving quality, decreasing costs, and increasing access to services. Attempts to do this are hindered by the very limited comparability currently possible between evaluations of case management programs. One cause of this limited comparability is that few individual evaluation reports provide clear and explicit information on key aspects of the evaluation, and on the case management program itself. Consequently, there is a need to ensure that the key characteristics of individual case management programs and their evaluations are clearly described when the results are reported. As a first step in achieving this, a review of the evaluation theory literature and the case management literature was undertaken to find effective ways of describing the differences in evaluations and in case management programs. The result is a draft framework to support the acknowledgment, identification, and description of these differences.