Managed care and case management of substance abuse treatment

Managed care has become an important subject for health service research and is used increasingly by health care payers to control health care use and costs. Health services research on managed care has relevance to the evaluation of case management of persons with substance abuse problems. Two issues in managed care that are particularly relevant to case management are the lack of explicit, widely accepted criteria for managed care and the lack of demonstrated cost savings attributable to managed care. Thorough, systematic evaluative research needs to be done before these issues are well understood.