Service costs for women with co-occurring disorders and trauma

Several aspects of costs related to health care and other service use at 6-month follow-up are presented for women with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders with histories of physical and/or sexual abuse receiving comprehensive, integrated, trauma-informed and consumer/survivor/recovering person-involved interventions (n = 1023) or usual care (n = 983) in a nine-site quasi-experimental study. Results show that, controlling for pre-baseline use, there are no significant differences in total costs between participants in the intervention condition and those in the usual care comparison condition, either from a governmental (avg. US dollars 13,500) or Medicaid reimbursement perspectives (avg. just over US dollars 10,000). When combined with clinical outcomes analyzed in other works in this issue by Cocozza et al. (2005) and Morrissey et al. (2005), which favored the intervention sites, these cost findings indicate that the treatment intervention services are cost-effective as compared with the usual care received by women at the comparison sites.